good lord, the cable news is SO WEIRD lately!! this is my news thread

hey guys, i am doing contract work at home and have the news on most of the time. this is where i will post weird cable news news. that cool?

yes!

ok, this guy is undercovered. bret baier. even bret baier got pissed at glenn beck. they usually do a teaser for the next program sometime during the previous hour, during beck's show they have some headline news reader break in & do the teaser that way, instead of beck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHJjdof50H4

there was a washington times story today about the justice dept. dropping a case against three (3) members of the black panthers allegedly for voter intimidation. a significant amt of time devoted to this on an earlier show on fox.. sometimes i wonder about story selection, right? idk, haven't read all of the story yet but.. well i wonder about story selection, allocation of resources..

the funny thing is, i specifically remember this being mentioned on election day last year and then the reporting that there wasn't much of anything to it, and no real irregularities. don't know what show i was watching that day though.

bret baier's house is very tasteful. (hey, it is the style section for washington dc, it is very tasteful)

clearly his wife ran the show here & he's like ok, just put in a bar

i'm not sure why people in twitteronia are feeling sorry for vanity fair intern (http://twitter.com/VFintern) watching cable news all day. 1) he has one of the most sought-after internship opportunities there are 2) he is graduating from yale and already has more experience/connections/opportunities than 99% of the country 3) watching cable news all day is not that hard.

IMHO they should've left dude locked in that office with cable news all summer long! it takes at least a couple weeks to really appreciate more than just ZOMG BREAKING NEWS, shiny graphics, people yelling at each other.

switched channels for a minute and chief twitter correspondent rick sanchez was, i guess, about to fact check some misleading rightwing ad about health care reform. so he plays the entire 30 second ad and then talks about how he's going to show obama saying something and blablabla and doesn't fact check right away, thus probably reinforces whatever they got wrong. good work!

once again shep sings over the TRACKING H1N1 animation, talks to another off-camera person about her having a baby recently, then makes them play the animation two more times and sings over it again.. i don't think they actually reported anything about h1n1.

and ana marie cox is on the case!

@VFintern If only all regular Fox viewers were so compelled. I have to say, I kind of love Shep Smith. TRACKING H1N1 ta-da....! #shepsmithneedsanewnetwork

I already started this thread, daria. (but it didn't take)

The Cable News Wasteland appreciation/depreciation thread, y'all.

oops, sorry! you gotta update, i didn't see that

tanning bed people ran an ad in the new york post blaming the media for reporting that they cause cancer. spox for tanning bed association interviewed on the studio b:

so.. tanning beds. this seems like a dumb thing to do, because you might get cancer.

i might get hit by a bus someday but i'm not going to go lie down in front of one!

shep declares he aint never been in no tanning bed, are you kidding me?
(obv shep doing a segment on this *required* this subject be addressed, because one had to wonder.)

jonathan hunt reports that blue moon is a girl beer XD

they decide guinness is the answer. OBVIOUSLY.

crazy birther at the world net crazy has a problem with bill o'reilly.
One of the somethings he is undoubtedly hiding is his birth certificate.

oops. this guy
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=105366

i'm kind of bummed that cavuto's people have redone his show graphics (maybe for HD?) and he no longer has a giant red pulsating space galaxy/sea anemone thing floating behind his head.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWPY7b35vF4

http://i31.tinypic.com/2vkat5u.jpg

isnt all money spent on porn "stimulus" money??? eh???????

CNN: "beer chat"
FOX: "beer summit" or "beer diplomacy"
MSNBC: that awful ed guy calling sarah palin "caribou barbie"

ah, joe the biden is at the beer summit! dey better keep an eye on him dere

candy crowley lost a bunch of weight looks like

i kind of really like candy crowley for reasons that are unclear to me.

maybe it's because she seems kind of dour?

i like her. i hardly ever see her on. but that may be because i am weary of most of the regulars on CNN & they have too many talking heads panels with them, so i don't watch - borger, castellanos, even carville and brazile, honestly. though i really really like jeffrey toobin, somehow he stays levelheaded amidst the absurdity.

the CNN is doing another "national report card" thing on a special about obama's second 100 days, or first 200 days, whatever. i flipped on the last one briefly and it looked like people giving out ice skating scores and was daft and pointless imho.

the shep has said a la homer simpson "MMMMM, BEER" approx fifty times this week.

I fide for Chris Matthews and Keith and Rachel all day but The Ed Show is so terrible. Please bring back 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue or give Eugene Robinson his own show or something.

ride

i can't watch the ed show either. call me superficial, but i might give it a little more of a chance if he had a pretty co-host. could be a man, mind you, but pretty. i'd be OK with them moving dylan ratigan to the evening spot, his show is quite watchable IMHO even if he talks over people a lot - he's got a crew with him (including spitzer, toure, contessa), it skews liberal and moves pretty fast.

i'd also like j0nathan capehart to be on tv more, he is the most debonair gentleman in all of journalism.

good grief, i actually read some of the comments to shep's post on facebook re: beer summit, and even the small part of the fox news audience who are shep fans on facebook.. are emphatically NOT liberals, it seems. unless the law of the interwebs, where the only people who comment are the complainers, is in effect here.

(his staff do the updates, he said on the air that he didn't do facebook or twitter, tv was enough, & someone off camera was like 'YES YOU ARE ON FACEBOOK')

the daily beast goes after judge napolitano

i haven't watched his show, aside from the episode where shep flipped the f out over torture. might check it out. i'm fascinated by fringe groups, cults, and conspiracy theories.

i don't think anything exciting or interesting has happened on tv today. mika brzezinski, the 'liberal' on morning joe, couldn't be convinced that health care reform wasn't dead.. who was arguing that it might happen and might work? john harwood from the wall street journal! at least scarbs declares that he's conservative.

the GDP didn't fall near as much as expected. to glenn beck and guest, this means.. WE'RE DOOMED

also, SHEP, age 16 it looks like, though he must have been at least late 20s by then XD

FOX/MSNBC peace accord fail, evidently.

obama was right, this stuff is totally like pro wrestling. though about pro wrestling, from what i remember, it is always more fun to root for the bad guys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6H6n_onZI0

actual lols at that Andrew WK video

i know, right? ok i'm just going to repost this clip (was on the fox thread), from which the title of this thread was inspired. this is like a perfect ~one minute gem of cable news

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkQQ7JkD1lE

i like this dylan ratigan guy. so chuck todd comes on to say something about this cash for clunkers program: hey you know, this is like health care and all this other stuff, we're rewarding people for good behavior! this fits in the white house philosophy!

they kind of ignore him & go back to discussing it the same way they did the previous hour, which is nassim ("black swan") taleb and ratigan agreeing that this is a completely terrible way of rewarding people for making BAD decisions.

seriously, this show should be on tv at a better hour, this is the most watchable daytime show that isn't studio b. ratigan is a very good interviewer. now if only he'd settle down a bit and not talk over people..

scarbs to ratigan: Just between you and me, how many lines did you do before coming out here today?

this seems to actually mean: "dude. we don't really feel like thinking about stuff."

there's this guy on now from politics magazine who.. waaau, is so particularly groomed and made up that he looks like he stepped out of a silent film & i can't tell if he's 45 or 25 and just doesn't get enough sleep.

okay so that Orly Taitz (sp?) dentist/lawyer/leader of the "birthers" lady was just on MSNBC screaming "LET ME FINISH" and "LISTEN TO THE TRUTH" for five minutes while the hosts tried to, you know, ask her questions. it was pretty chaotic and lol.

christ what a bunch cackling nitwits.

xpost to ratigan video

good grief, these birthers. there's really nothing you can do to convince them. i heard one person ranting away about it & in response to the point about obama's birth announcement being in a honolulu paper, said oh, that was just his grandmother calling in an announcement, he was really born in kenya. ??? the other thing is where rightwingers say they don't believe it, but then say well you should investigate and see if it's true, just dancing around and letting the story hang out there instead of declaring.. facts.

imo when purveyors of horseshit like Billo and NRO start calling you crazy, you might want to take heed.

xpost yeah i don't know what happened to morning joe, i used to like it, but quit watching for a while due to being beyond infuriated with scarbs thinking it's perfectly OK for the US to torture people & that right wing extremism is a big joke. (seriously, he laughed about that one.)

i'll put it on now in the early AM because the CNN is boring and i can't sit through the fox and friends. scarborough was just straight up rude to ratigan, really being a jackass. anyway i'm not even kidding about the dylan ratigan doing a pretty good show, it's pretty heavy on talk about the economy and wall street bailouts in particular, though i wish it didn't get interrupted so often by commercials and 'breaking news' that usually isn't.

<3 thraed

little green footballs is off the chain with attacking and making fun of the birthers, who they call 'nirthers' for whatever reason. that's saying something, because last i checked that blog was known in the lefty blogosphere as little green fascists.

i was thinking about cnn earlier. they are such a distant third in entertainment value when compared to fox & msnbc but i think that throwing themselves so headlong into social networks/the internet is pretty brave and dope tbh. i would watch rick sanchez every day if he wasn't on at the same time as shep. i haven't been watching as much shep tho lately. i need to get back in the swing of things.

howard dean hosting olbermann was O_O and the hilarious, tiny british man with the dumbo ears was pretty good

howard dean hosting olbermann was O_O

was so disappointed in how bland this ended up being ;_;

oh the pretty britishes guy is richard wolffe. talking points memo is on his shit & MSNBC's, because wolffe works for a PR firm now, he used to be/sometimes is a 'journalist.' worked for newsweek & wrote an account (Renegade) of being on the road with the obama campaign & apparently had a lot more access to the candidate than most of the reporters on the trail. also was on countdown pretty much every day nodding in agreement to whatever olbermann said.

yeah dean was all right, i watched some of it. they should put on some people he can argue with, maybe olbermann's bookers have no contacts any more who actually disagree with their usual host.

yeah i know all about wolffe but his name slipped my mind & i didn't feel like looking it up. my friends and i always make fun of him for being british so we yell "ALLO THERE KEITH!" a lot and shit - we're pretty cool guys - i def was a lil o_O about him writing an obama book tbh because i imagined it to be a pure cash grab and not like i care much about journalistic standards on cable news but yeah

i can't watch sanchez. i'm not thrilled with their current use of technology, i appreciate that they're trying new stuff, but from my POV it seems they get redundant with it. i don't need a shot of a screen in the studio when you can just as well put that screen itself right on the tv & not have the stuff i'm supposed to be looking at shot from a weird off-center angle and some dude trying to move it around.

also if i post stuff on the twitter it's already on my screen, i don't need to see it on the scrollbar on the CNN - it reminds me of that old VH1 pop-up video or .. jeez didn't they do that on The Box or something?

wau MSNBC replaying a few minutes of that, holy shit orly taitz is straight out of a john waters movie!

def one of the wackiest interviews i've ever seen, and i watch a lot of cable news!

should be a youtube classic imo.

thing is, this birther thing IMHO isn't even news. it's crap. it doesn't need to be on the news. i'm concerned that liberals on the tv news being all too eager to talk about the crazies & paint the gop as crazy is.. giving this way more hype than it deserves because the more this stuff spreads, the further it takes the REAL crazies down a scary road.

beck starts out by mocking liberal bloggers again, what with fake typing and talking like the comic book guy.
^^^
this is in fact The One Thing i appreciate about glenn beck.

oh he thinks cash for clunkers is a government conspiracy to make your computer government property and monitor everything on it.

that would be dope - i want to communicate directly with barack obama

looooooool

ok someone on the tv box here needs to recognize that if your track record is 75% crazy speculation and conspiracy theories to 25% fair points based in facts and reality, your reputation for being able to make a fair point might suffer a bit.

the thing is, there has to be a real patch of common ground between judge napolitano and his freedom watch crew, and organizations like the aclu & frankly a lot of liberal bloggers re: policies of the bush administration, the patriot act, surveillance programs, etc.

woooooaaaahhh beck's new thing is a segment called "Use Your Head" and the opening animation has these dope Wax Trax! graphics

http://i25.tinypic.com/bwiyw.jpg

glenn beck, front 242, what's the difference? the government = TYRANNY >FOR< YOU

huh. beck very deliberately telling his audience that if anyone resorts to violence it will destroy the republic and ruin everything they're doing. "there is no excuse for violence."

then says if anyone talks about turning violent it is "your patriotic duty to stop them."

??? wonder if it has something to do with this particular beck fan..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YbBxYBvU_c

here's that orly taitz interview i mentioned a couple hours ago.

bill oreilly explaining that obama is using the birth certificate stuff as a way to smear the entire gop as crazy.
now, i wouldn't say obama is doing this personally but.. one could argue it is, indeed, something that democrats don't mind talking about when it makes republicans look *far* out there.

oreilly says the voters don't care about obama's records, they want health care fixed and the economy fixed. huh. you are entering the.. sanity zone? ~~CAUTION~~

and good lord. nobody far out on one side will ever successfully prove, or disprove, that the people far out on the other side are more crazy, or less crazy. if we could only stop trying to prove it for a minute.

orly taitz reminds me of the chicken lady from KITH

http://vogons.zetafleet.com/files/orly.jpg

lol

hahaha, the chicken lady.

watching this dylan ratigan again. he's obsessed with the "banksters" using wall street like a casino instead of creating anything of value & the fed not doing much of anything to regulate the financial system. now have on a guy from exile (the obnoxious moscow expat mag) who wrote a book about going postal. interesting stuff. plus i don't even know who coined the term "banksters" but i only see it on liberal leaning economic blogs, atrios, and corrente wire..

i sorta like dylan ratigan! i think he could clock himself down to one usage of "generational theft" per half hour tho

true that. he gets a bit repetitive with it! still, i don't know that i hear anyone else on the cable news talking about the bailouts that way. i mean he sounds like atrios. some good guests on there too, today he had moe tkacik (who i knew from jezebel, but i think she's primarily a business/finance writer)

the shep talked to john bolton about this north korea thing. but i guess other than worrying about the precedent it sets to have clinton go over there (which seems fair), bolton didn't say anything nutty.

d-rat today -> "America's wealth gap has reached banana republic levels."

taleb going off about bernanke, summers, geithner yesterday.

wait wtf are "banksters" please

i am imagining greying, portly dudes in wayfarers & bespoke cutoffs, riding golden fixies

afaik, it's a portmanteau of "bankers" and "gangsters" used to describe the heads of financial firms like Goldman, Lehman, Bear Stearns, etc. by those who want to imply that.. they're making off with shit tons of taxpayer money in a rigged system, basically.

don't know who coined the term but i know it from angry bloggers like this:

It's a merry go round called denial on a world class scale. The banksters are still drunk on money and power, and the Fed, the Treasury, and the finance wing of the FKDP are classic enablers. Instead of taking the bottle away, theyre trying to bond with the alcholic by becoming their source of supply!

it's pretty remarkable to hear a dude who built his career as a business journalist using this term all the time. d-rat might be kind of a dick irl but i don't really mind, it's like.. he runs a frat house except it's made up of ppl from all different backgrounds and you just have to roll with it. i missed what actually happened the other day when he and touré took a test on air to find out if either one of them was racist, but the teasers for it = lolz.

i am fascinated because i've worked with dudes like this at previous jobs & you'd think they'd be the #1 people on my shit list, but i don't really care & find them hilarious. wkiw.

in honor of obama's birthday, that glenn beck going over a brief history his life inc playing clips from his autobiographies out-of-context to imply that he was indoctrinated with marxism, socialism, and communism, plays clip of bill ayers, says he's great friends with a "terrorist sympathizer" (khalidi), now talking about rev wright and playing the "god damn america" clip. i mean this is the greatest hits version of every possible rightwing lowdown paranoid 'clearly you hate america' attack of the past three years. has a birthday cake with the chinese flag + candles on it.

now, i'm not saying it's inciting anything.. hey shep, i'm not saying fox's crazy emailers might be incited by this stuff, but i'm not saying they're not..

this whole show is about showing how every little thing ever done by obama and his administration is part of some big secret powerful long running conspiracy carried out via community organizing and ACORN to turn the country into.. something?

man since, when, the late 50s? early 60s? the stock in trade of the GOP was scaring everyone with COMMUNISM for any kind of modest ameliorative reform effort: medicare, civil rights, etc. ginning up voter anxiety to carry water for elite interests, garden variety conservative playbook stuff. but now it seems we have a whole generation that believes all that stuff wholly -- returning the top rate to pre-bush levels really is the same thing as liquidating the kulaks. they don't have to be scared with the "similarities," everything they can't stand is already completely synonymous

i have to read up on that.. ideas on where to start?

also. guys, you saw that one car chase (i think it was houston) where the dude ended up turning into a big parking garage & of course driving around in there, gets cornered by the cops.

didn't they try that in 'menace II society'??

(going through netflix recommendations and this is going to bother me now, if i don't know)

beeeeeeer summit with chief britishes correspondent jonathan hunt. because without him, this particular newscast would be hurting for lack of irony. the last min of this is hilarious. i <3 <3 <3 <3 guinness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59yT3Sx70oU

kelly's court is now in session!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt2a868Q7I4

in honor of obama's birthday, that glenn beck going over a brief history his life inc playing clips from his autobiographies out-of-context to imply that he was indoctrinated with marxism, socialism, and communism, plays clip of bill ayers, says he's great friends with a "terrorist sympathizer" (khalidi), now talking about rev wright and playing the "god damn america" clip. i mean this is the greatest hits version of every possible rightwing lowdown paranoid 'clearly you hate america' attack of the past three years. has a birthday cake with the chinese flag + candles on it.

this is amazing

i have a thing for megyn kelly tbh

hey daria you saw that olbermann has temp banned richard wolffe from his show? pretty good move imo, but he's pretty in tune w blogger happenings

this GE/msnbc/keith thing is super depressing to me

his special comment was fire tonite imo

http://www.saasta.fi/saasta/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/2008-10-05.gif

ok i am fucking dying at frame 7 al capone there

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB3rMOgSzuk

at first i thought beck was just being really queeny at the start here, then realized he was riffing on marilyn monroe and couldn't stop from recoiling a few feet from the screen. ugh. i do that a lot when beck is on. as for the rest of it.. there must be a german word for someone who tries to be funny this way, but isn't funny?

megyn kelly is alright. and funny.

Glenn Beck, man of a thousand voices

i'm afraid

<3 kilmeade twitter. it's not even like he's texting this stuff, he's using the webbernets interface, but never proper English.

@KarmaLyn shes americas healer
21 minutes ago from web in reply to KarmaLyn

Paula should reconsider or risk going away like Star Jones, & Jackie Martling
21 minutes ago from web

http://i30.tinypic.com/333k2dc.jpg

this fucking guy. i guess he played well in some professional sports event that i will never speak of again

i mean just look at the shit eating grin on his face. wait, maybe i should actually CREDIT dan the snyder with upping the prices in NFL, thus letting eli's agent demand that the football giants spend a huge chunk of $$$/cap space to keep him?

lou dobbs calls olbermann some stuff, says the real stories about KO's tenure at CNN are yet to come out, says he's on some mystery medications

this is all hilarious and great. one giant feedback loop of pointless blather and everyone gets paid! god bless america.

olbermann snapped back at dobbs tonight, said some shit about dobbs' wife that made me cringe a bit. get a room, fellas.

i can't stand keith olbermann. he went off yesterday about billo and fox news. o'reilly going off now about GE (owner of NBC now) for some fine they got & accusing them of corruption and promoting obama.

ok, so did rupert murdoch manage to completely punk GE/NBC/olbermann here? i mean, some "truce" is called june 1, olbermann goes along with it, truce gets leaked to the press, olbermann looks completely disingenuous & tries to cover his ass, so calls out o'reilly and murdoch again and the overexplains to the blogs, making the situation worse.

o'reilly goes right back to attacking GE/NBC for getting billions of taxpayer money & sucking up to obama.

sometimes i look at the new answers & realize why i hang out here and talk to myself

sotomayor confirmed. and after all those weeks of people freaking out over the 'wise Latina' comment, the shep is like, wasn't she just talking to an audience she was trying to inspire? you know when i go back to mississippi i talk to people about being from there & being successful and all. later on napolitano says, another liberal justice wrote an autobiography saying justices all bring themselves, eg who they are as a person, to the bench, that everyone has a point of view, and she was saying the same thing. talking about today as historic. <3

& shep flat out asked sen. martinez if he was pandering to hispanic constituents in florida by voting yes, since he's a conservative republican, then got him to say that he thought other republicans should've voted differently. these are totally fair questions, but he's been v tough on republicans & said something about lindsey graham's ability to smile while he's just tearing someone to shreds. asked judge bork if it wasn't the responsibility of the GOP to sufficiently ask questions to find out enough about the nominee's views.

this is really interesting to me because it seems the underlying point to all the sotomayor coverage on shep's shows - ok, i guess he just said so - is that we don't find out much of anything about the nominees in these hearings any more. and that even the dems/obama might end up being surprised by how she actually votes. which is so true, & frustrating watching nearly all the oxygen taken up by rightwingers (unjustly) calling her a racist, and the left saying ZOMG those racists called her a racist.

surprisingly, sanchez @ the cnn was on a completely different subject during and after the vote & didn't stick with this very long at all.

i flipped back to msnbc and shuster/hall were talking to some dem strategist about.. the gop portraying her as a racist.

and to be extra contrarian, i don't know how i feel about dems portraying all the town hall protesters as angry fringe types brought there by astroturfing pr/lobbying firms. it's true that some of the disruptive people were organized that way, and astroturfing is dishonest and corrupts the process, but on the other hand, there really *are* plenty of people who are uneasy about health care reform and other things the government is doing. it just looks like dismissing all dissenters out of hand, which IMHO is a bad strategy.

fareed zakaria asks hillary <3 <3 <3 about what john bolton said re: rewarding north korea. she just laughs.

cnn's 'first 200 days' special is tonight with another report card! not sure why they didn't go by jon stewart's assessment and kill it after the first time

bill o'reilly writes in parade magazine:
"What President Obama Can Teach America's Kids
"'Obama's "breathtaking achievement presents five important lessons for all children:' Forgiveness, Respect, Persistence, and the notion that in America anything is possible."

saved for later!

http://i27.tinypic.com/1221edc.jpg

drinking (fake?) wine with fake pelosi

i really don't know what the deal was here, i had to turn the sound off

"'Obama's "breathtaking achievement presents five important lessons for all children:' Forgiveness, Respect, Persistence, and the notion that in America anything is possible."

Is it just me, or is that only four lessons?

i think what happened is ben politico summarized it and left something out, i guess the thing hasn't been published yet.

i wonder if that is shep's stage manager there in the pelosi mask, whoever it was *could not stop laughing* the entire time

keith olbermann criticized by a bunch of people, putting some blame on his management team while he was out taking care of his dying mother

?? dude, it's YOUR show, you own it. some might say this is embarrassing.

w/o rly knowing what the beef is, i defer to glen gleenwald. if this is some murdoch/g.e. feud-by-proxy, gross!

uh, glenn greenwald

i don't have the impression there's a murdoch/GE feud, more a mutual awareness that these two sniping at each other wasn't good business? o'reilly's fans (and there are a heck of a lot more of them) might've been especially out of pocket what with barging into a GE shareholder meeting..

so maybe someone at news corp thought o'reilly was going way too far? i don't typically watch him, but saw o'reilly completely freak out about it once, talking to the shep (hype man for o'reilly's hillary <3 <3 <3 interview, so i did have to watch the factor that day). not sure if he was *trying* to push o'reilly's buttons by asking if he'd ever want to host a network newscast.. but instantly went from strained but polite conversation to o'reilly just going off about how he'd never work for nbc news, how horrible they were, how GE was dealing with terrorist regimes and they all had blood on their hands and were responsible for getting our soldiers killed. it was like boom, full-on angry finger pointing rant mode, totally unhinged. shep said something quietly to the effect that brian williams was a friend & he had a lot of friends at nbc & o'reilly ended up looking pretty awkward. so i figure, if he was on the factor night after night straight up telling people GE/NBC was getting american soldiers killed.. eventually that's gotta cause problems for GE.

<3 <3 <3 glenn greenwald. what's funny with keith and billo is, i guess if you even try to treat either of them like a serious journalist (even though obv neither one is), they pretty much lose their shit.

chris wallace just now: "when in doubt, always close with a piano playing cat."

i wonder just how pissy olbermann gets about this tonight. i guess he can be as embarrassing as he wants so long as he gets the ratings, but now that even (some) liberal bloggers/huffpo are questioning him..

so i guess that beck guy joked about poisoning pelosi's wine but the best thing about this: the person in pelosi mask seriously. cannot. stop. laughing.

poor toobin, he's better than this. there are TWO tables of pundits grading stuff!
http://i25.tinypic.com/w2jb6a.jpg

hey daria

this is like my favorite thread on ilx. keep posting at length even if no one else is. in a few weeks, when i go back to school, i'll jump back in the cable news game. for now i'm spending my days playing playstation and going out to lunch with my grandmother. i <3 u 4 this tho.

i think i'm not the first person to make this joke, but cnn really needs to get a hollywood squares like contraption going

you're right, btw, about the way liberal commenters are treating the psedu-astroturf protests. keith & maddow - both of whom i love - have been glossing over the larger point that these people have had their minds basically poisoned in order to fish around in this larger pool of corruption and fake grassroots and if you watch these videos it's just obv not true. tonight keith had a kind of disgusting segment with jonathon alter dissecting these rallies, and while the video was compelling, the way they responded to these people was really elitist in a way that's really on the wrong side of the line. and i rarely feel that way. alter seemed almost sheepish tbh.

thanks! i have to find some way to entertain myself. i am doing freelance data migration type stuff and it is SO boring (but pays good money) and it's like, i need basically one concentrated distraction, otherwise i get completely distracted by everything. it's like writing a term paper, there has to be music on or my brain won't stay tuned to one subject.

i saw some maddow earlier, she & guest were also on point, arguing that nobody really got too far into what sotomayor's actual views were & a lot remains unknown. i like maddow very much about 2/3 of the time, can't handle the 1/3 where she's.. doing cute 'conservatives are fools' segments to make her audience feel good about themselves.

surprisingly when cnn's media & pundits grade the media, they all think they suck and give themselves a gentleman's C except for GOP dude castellanos, who is like "A!" and then goes on about how newspapers might be in trouble, but there are all these great new sources of information and it's coming in from everywhere! the internet, the blogs!

i wouldn't have expected the conservative pundit to be the new media evangelist there.

ok napolitano has been off the chain today about this theory that the white house requested people email them health care misinformation because.. they want to intimidate people. (link is from this guy whose entire blog is devoted to stanning for fox news)

i wouldn't go that far! generally i tend to appreciate napolitano's constant skepticism/wariness about basically everything the government does, but i think he gets a little paranoid.

I heard about this on the radio on some second string right wing broadcast and the guy was saying that he wouldn't say that it was an Orwellian move by the administration, but then his producer and screen clearly were trying to put on people who would imply that it was, and the host couldn't help strongly implying that it was either. Thing is, I just kept saying, "This is boring. The move was completely inappropriate, a p.r. disaster, could too easily be misread and the administration shouldn't put themselves in a position of being seen as have the power to abuse people's privacy for having a certain political position. Who's arguing? Next crazy right wing agenda, please."

If the Bush administration did this dailykos or whomever would certainly harp on it.

As for Castellanos' A: you've read about those tests researchers did in which the subjects did little quizzes, gave their political affiliation and then rated their confidence in having right answers? And the self-identifying Republicans not only scored lower but also had higher confidence in the rightness of their answers?

I wish Maddow's and Olberman's shows tried less to be antidotes to the crap on Fox and CNN. I'm also tired of seeing so many of the same guest talking heads every day (Eugene Robinson, Anna Marie Cox). Why maintain the illusion that they're guests if they're on the payroll, if they're there everyday? Maddow went on and an about the C Street thing for two weeks despite the fact that the information only trickled in.

Basically agree about the astroturfing thing. Sure, there's a concerted lobbying effort behind this, but these people aren't showing up to the town hall meetings for the same reasons that the lobbyists, PR firms and the corporate interests paying them are - they really think this stuff and care about it. So the obviously find new ways to communicate with them, and make sure that constituents in favor of the Dems' health care reform keep the representatives mindful that they're voting too.

xpost - sorry! - maddow seems to be one of the few on tv who actually takes seriously the prospect of political violence incited by this rhetoric. had on rep. baird (d-wa) who cancelled his town hall meetings due to the possibility of extremists disrupting them.

i wonder what kind of emails they're getting. because if this is what we're hearing on the news, what we're not hearing might be truly scary.

i also wonder if progressives/democrats are making a big mistake by dismissing and mocking this tea party thing, in the sense that, people are out there organizing, and they're connecting, and they're showing up, and i don't know what they're going to do other than try to screw things up for obama, but isn't it better to actually try and understand what they're doing and why? i'm just saying, if significant & growing numbers of citizens are organizing... something, maybe you had better pay attention to why they're bothering to do it. what happens when they start throwing money/time at candidates and running for office themselves?

it was a bad PR move. napolitano made the point that the whitehouse has to keep messages that people send, that's just the law, but in this context, what are the implications.. and i guess the right is reading it as a call to snitch on your neighbors.

i wouldn't agree with castellanos A, was more struck by the fact that he was the only one who seemed excited about new media & the rest were all glum about the death of journalism. wouldn't have expected a republican to be the one who's all "hooray change! the future!!"

and i am so uninterested in the C street story.

i mean, the dems were light years ahead in netroots/online organizing during the last election, but it might not take as long for the other side to catch up as they think. the tea party thing + recess/town halls + dems saying some things that threw fuel on it.. i mean, the right got people angry, now they're giving them things to do..

Are you talking to me? I agree that communication and education are the key, but . . . where is there an honest debate about the merits of health care reform in the mainstream media? Charlie Rose? Who makes basic arguments like: "Although we will spend this money and tax you, because we can run health care more efficiently, prices will drop and competition in the marketplace will benefit us all, and the saved money can theoretically go back into GDP, thereby making us richer"? The public rhetoric will drive the votes, won't it? Or the rhetoric and the marketing of it for political purposes. And the major news media outlets simplify the arguments until they practically atomize them and will give bogus equal time to oppositional arguments no matter the fallacies or falsehoods.

I know what I'd like by way of news information and televised debate, &c., and it doesn't include ridiculing opposing ideologues. However, I'm not decided about the pragmatics of using news media platforms to effect political change or preserve political power. The democrats have been traditionally more reluctant to engage in the sort of speech and PR and mudslinging as the republicans (how true is this about the dems anyway, is it just mythologizing?), but they see the tactics of the right wing media and maybe they think, "I want some of that. I want to try that. If it works for them, it could work for me." Could it work for them? Or would reaching out across the aisle work better?

But yes, I agree, these people who are organizing should be addressed somehow with easily-digestible but credible messages. That's the hard part. The bullshit lines of the health care opposition are easy to parrot; except not all of these are bullshit lines, I guess - I saw one of the town hall clips with one representative saying such and such a thing wasn't her job (knowing the particulars of the senate bill, I think) and I was thinking, oh, I don't know, "How injudicious," or something.

I really want the public discourse, especially the televised discourse, elevated to the level that I, as someone who supports this legislation (or the gist of this legislation), can understand it philosophically, fiscally, operationally - everything. That isn't happening/won't happen.

What am I doing, am I in a political discussion? I hardly follow politics. To self: watching twenty minutes of MSNBC here and there is not following politics.

Death of journalism - this is some McLuhan shit. Journalists need to know their McLuhan in and out, I think!

http://i27.tinypic.com/1221edc.jpg
one of these people knows how to hold a glass of wine properly. the other one is just keepin it real

john harwood hosting some "NYT edition" hour on msnbc talking to matt bai: Funny How? The president, it turns out, is quite funny — and sometimes a little reckless.

apparently older people don't "get" obama's sense of humor

that new york times stuff on msnbc is pretty dang weird - it seems like such an obv reaction to rupert having the wall street journal as a forum

yeah it is weird! also i thought they had a particular connection to the washington post, since their people are on there all the time, right out of the wapo newsroom. i wish they'd give more airtime to some of the other journalists at those papers instead of mostly having on pundits/political writers.

LOLs @ fox news teaser for tonight's programming: watch BECK.. and later on, our special on CHARLES MANSON

TONIGHT: sean hannity LIVE at the FREEDOM CONCERT with special guests OLIVER NORTH and CARRIE PREJEAN
ROCKING OUT FOR FREEDOM

(realized i have to be somewhere & was like, damn..)

god he has SUCH a boner for carrie prejean. it's so awful.

he's always like EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH CARRIE PREJEAN - and really no one cares

ugh now i am imagining a hannity boner, thanks jordan

the great american boner

does he refer to it as "a great american"

xpost ha

well i don't care about carrie prejean, but what do i know, i hate freedom, america, puppies, kittens, and apple pie

http://www.mediaite.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/parade_8-7.jpg
stealing ur bandwidth, dan abrams

correlation =/ causation, but this is funny
What's Bad for the GOP Is Good for Fox News

ok, guess i was on the right track. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/06/AR2009080604105.html";>kurtz</a>:

(GE CEO) Immelt detailed his grievances. His elderly parents in Cincinnati, he said, watch O'Reilly every night. How did Ailes think his mother felt when O'Reilly put up Immelt's picture and blamed him for involvement in the killing of American soldiers in Iraq?

(GE had done business in Iran, a nation which U.S. officials said was arming Shiite militias in Iraq, but the corporation has since ended those contracts and now provides only health-care aid licensed by the federal government. "If my child were killed in Iraq, I would blame the likes of Jeffrey Immelt," O'Reilly once told viewers.)

Ailes countered by asking Immelt how O'Reilly's wife must feel when Olbermann made references to the Fox host's personal life and a long-settled sexual harassment suit. Olbermann once imagined the fate of "a poor kid" born to a transgendered man who became pregnant, adding: "Kind of like life at home for Bill's kids."

nice job going after the transgender person, progressive hero keith. anyway, after Olbermann calls out O'Reilly for the Tiller murder:

The next night, O'Reilly retaliated. He said MSNBC was spewing "hate," declaring: "Immelt is using his news operation to promote the Obama administration and liberal activities, while seeking billion-dollar government contracts from the president." O'Reilly said his program was looking into whether GE was doing "deadly business" with Iran. He gave out Immelt's e-mail address.

sorry
Out and a Bout- Olbermann, O'Reilly Are Still Fighting

http://i32.tinypic.com/ab441c.jpg

dude on far right (hah) -> roger ailes

this is like pro wrestling if pro wrestling were just a bunch of angry guys cutting promos all day long and nobody actually fought, they just cut more promos.

rachael maddow going all-in tonight on this subject of.. the implications of people like limbaugh comparing dems to nazis, beck's rhetoric, some of these astroturf groups.. if using language evoking nazism is a specific call to violence. guest on saying the coded language to the crazies is saying "go for broke."

her guest Frank Schaeffer brought up all the massive sale of guns/ammunition since the election and straight-up asked what beck and fox news would say when someone takes a shot at the POTUS or a congressman or senator.

Hosts Refire the Insult Machines

The executives had sought for years to tamp down the attacks by Mr. Olbermann and Mr. O’Reilly, to little success. Frustrated by the refusal by NBC’s chief executive, Jeffrey Zucker, to halt the attacks on Mr. O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, personally instructed Mr. O’Reilly’s program to aim at Mr. Immelt, people familiar with the situation said.

hahaha roger ailes doesn't play

keyboard cat = PATRIOT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpHsUIzk7HU

That clip makes Bill O'Reilly seem sort of . . . endearing and . . . good humored?

Oh god, RIP Fatso :(

bingo. more billo/shep. kind of friendly, though mostly not? this interview was suppposed to be about oreilly interview of hillary clinton but it turned into something else. i don't think oreilly enjoys answering questions & bringing up msnbc.. trouble!

07:25 starts the stuff about msnbc/nbc & by the end it's like woah, oreilly is PISSED

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ2o_Ht1dE0

he's in this business to GET guys like jeffrey immelt, see.

what's also weird, from the NYT article

The deal extends beyond the prime-time hour that Mr. Olbermann and Mr. O’Reilly occupy. Employees of daytime programs on MSNBC were specifically told by executives not to mention Fox hosts in segments critical of conservative media figures, according to two staff members. The employees requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal matters.

In July, after Mr. Olbermann condemned Fox’s Glenn Beck for letting a guest assert that a terrorist attack in the United States might be a good thing, Mr. Beck booked a segment about G.E. and declared that a “merger between G.E. and the Obama administration” was “nearly complete.”

why does beck respond to olbermann by going after GE? did someone at fox (ailes?) give notice to everyone about targeting GE/NBC?

i mean i suppose oreilly's people could've suggested it. what really surprises me is all the msnbc dayside people being told not to mention fox hosts *even when criticizing conservative media*. and they did that? wtf?

sunday chat shows are all full of these clips of angry, angry, angry people shouting down their reps on health care.

on this earlier thread back in april, i speculated that ppl are crying about socialism and obama hasn't even DONE anything yet, what'll happen when he gets to health care? the answer is.. NAZIS!

gingrich trying his damndest to actually promote the idea that encouraging euthanasia is in this health care reform. and earlier he's calling others intellectually dishonest? this is insane.

stephanopoulos: "It's not in the bill!"

now peggy noonan is on, god help us all

cavuto! durka durka durka public option jihad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMu6wCqdeyQ

daria, how have you not sent your fist through your television screen by now?

i thought of doing that yesterday because i was house sitting & the giant tv wasn't tuning in anything (no cable) & i started to get kind of irritated, like.. F***ING THING SUCKS! DO IT LIVE!

there is no news on the news today. the shep picked a good day to take off. this greg jarrett filling in today is ok but zzzzzz. the cnn has this velshi dude going out to find how healthcare affects the real america. what, NOW they're trying to find out? what?!

i'm not sure why, with all the resources they have at the cnn, velshi is on bad quality digital video here, or whatever. i don't know anything technical, but it's choppy and terrible quality and has satellite delays constantly, and it's not like he's reporting from tora bora

rick sanchez is not that great of an interviewer. observation. he's got this guy on who was prescribed one painkiller for a dental procedure and ended up hooked on oxycontin. but somehow key pieces of the story (how precisely did he jump from one to the other? was he prescribed too much at once? did he keep going back and demanding new scrips? did he follow directions?) got left out, because IMHO sanchez decided what story he wanted to tell before conducting the interview & just skipped over information that the viewer might like to have.

ny mag:

Back in April, when the debate over torture was roaring, Jon Stewart invited Cliff May, a national-security hawk and former spokesman for the Republican Party, to come on The Daily Show and defend waterboarding. May was hesitant. He thought Stewart would paint him as a crazy extremist. The audience would jeer. It would be a disaster. "I was apprehensive about going on, even though I've been on TV for a dozen years," says May. "A lot of my friends told me: 'Don't do it. You're meat going into the sausage factory.'"

But May had a change of heart after soliciting advice from his friend Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard. "Kristol told me: 'You'll be pleasantly surprised. He doesn't take cheap shots. Jon is smart. You'll do just fine.'" Kristol proved to be right. Stewart's interview of May — a crackling, lengthy debate about where to draw the line between freedom and security — produced one of the most clarifying discussions about torture on television. "Literally, this is the best conversation I've had on this subject anywhere," May told Stewart.

Conservatives like Stewart because he's providing them a platform to reach an audience that usually tunes them out. And they often find that Stewart takes them more seriously than right-wing political hosts, who are often just using them to validate their broad positions, do. Stewart will poke fun, but he offers a good-faith debate on powder kegs — torture, abortion, nuclear weapons, health care — that explode on other networks. "Shepard Smith did the same discussion [on torture]," says May. "He kept yelling me at me: 'This is where I get off the bus! Not in my name!' He wasn't arguing with me. It was just assertions and anger. That's not what Jon deals in."

Daily Show: Cliff May is anti-torture, but outlines circumstances in which he believes it is justified.

i did wonder after he was on studio b the second time, if they booked him just so shep could yell at him again
but.. good lord, i just watched the daily show thing and it's infuriating - stewart lets him get away with saying these people are anti-torture & the memos are against it. lets the guy go on and on through his talking points. and eventually kind of starts yelling at him but it's the daily show so it's ironic. you might watch the whole interview & agree with everything jon stewart says and come away thinking we screwed up, but we understand why, and we won't do it again, and that's that. (and so why prosecute anyone, then?) and we know what stewart thinks & that he's a liberal so let's agree to disagree.

crazy the ny mag brought this up specifically because i really think cliff may is just cheney-level despicable what with representing an organization called 'defense of democracies' and advocating for bush admin policies that imho wreck the very foundations of it

o'reilly doing an opening segment about how fox news pwns everyone in the ratings, is the only network that's fair in their reporting, and is the most powerful voice in the news media

it is kind of funny how o'reilly takes it upon himself to speak for fox news & the quality of fox reporting & how awesome they are. maybe this contributes to many people believing there isn't any difference between the fox pundits and the journalists, ya think? but it's like.. cavuto is a journalist but hardly fair and balanced, and i don't know WTH is up with the fox nation which might just lead people to believe they're playing to & encouraging an audience that just looooooooves trashing democrats..

oh god, he's interviewing NANCY GRACE. i can't STAND her. though he's trying to figure out why the heck she did 206 shows on casey anthony & she seems kind of righteously pissed off, though doesn't she do nothing *but* get righteously pissed off?

ok next he's going to go after maddow & that guy for this (which was excellent imho):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E1SLJgATvM

btw i wonder if the $$$$$$$$ budgeted at fox for o'reilly's ridiculous salary came directly out of the $$$$$$$$ for his set design, because he has like one table, three chairs, and a couple of screens.

i guess it is pretty good value for the money if you can kick everyone's ass in the ratings for nearly a decade with one guy bloviating on a set that looks like it was in storage from one of those late 90's tabloid TV shows (of which i really, really wish there were an archive on google video or something, i'm very interested in them)

loooooooooool: o'reilly brings up palin's comment about 'death panels,' shows howard dean debunking it by saying euthanasia is not in the bill, and then attacks dean for making up the euthanasia issue to smear sarah palin. fair and balanced!

seriously love these shows. i don't sit around and watch this but i used to watch jerry springer. springer's great, everyone's in on the joke really.

1993.. HARD COPY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ktz3P5gv8iE

this could be on fox news today!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_E1WrJKHrU

plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose

didn't billo start off on hard copy?

that was where the "fuck it, do it live" thing happened, right?

checked.. billo was on 'inside edition.' & shep worked at 'a current affair' briefly. can totally see how fox news style picked up from these kinds of shows. which are the kinds of things you'd watch in the 80s/90s in the 'real america'/flyover country because it's pretty boring out there most days, right, so you might as well see what's weird on tv.

Matt Taibbi ever show up on cable news to explain how the Beloved Party is taking a dive on healthcare?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfKqAUzM-b8

i guess he was on that ed show which i never, ever, ever watch talking about goldman, i haven't seen him anywhere else. i don't think he's on tv too much

more from the wonderful, weird world of cable news

so this dylan ratigan guy, who i really like, has to promote his new show. the raison d'etre for this show is apparently holding an interesting 'conversation' every day, so every time he talks about the show he has to say 'conversation' over and over & always says on the air that he's bringing someone else into the conversation. the ironic part is that he talks over & cuts off his guests incessantly, every single day.

d-rat & eliot spitzer explain you the bank bailouts and the federal reserve, and they know what they're talking about. but this is cable news, so he pulls out a trash bag, a bunch of monopoly money, and funny hats, somebody scrambles to find b-roll to put on the massive screen behind them, and the camera is panning all over the room (and at about 5:10 i think a roach runs over it). and why does there turn out to be a cowboy boot in the trash bag? nobody can explain this.

the use of props gives me hope that glenn beck has contributed something positive to the national dialogue after all.

Federal Reserve is a Ponzi Scheme, an Inside Job

morbs, i have reached a morbs-like state of cynicism re: health care

daria are you too busy for this today?? my eyes are bleeding I'm so bored. Post some crazy for us!!!!

lol nancy grace, can't stand her

a vision of justice where bad things only happen to middle class white girls

i'm at a friend's place working on stuff, no cable! i will be home later. there was a CAR CHASE today and my understanding is, this happened in the early afternoon, but it did not stop the shep from replaying much of it on his show. because, CAR CHASE

trying and failing to find a list of exactly what the 13 points were in Nation of Ulysses 13-Point Program to Destroy America. that glenn beck only has 12 principles, so there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm96YypzyXI

dude did not get the memo about waiting until afternoon to pull something like this

nancy grace is truly the worst person on cable. worse than hannity, worse than greta, worse than tucker carlson, EVEN FUCKING WORSE THAN GERALDO. i mean, none of those people explicitly exploit dead children.

xxxxxxxxp

well daria, you were bound to believe me AND your eyes!

that car chase was kind of a disappointment

some crazy 4 U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_031nd7uCk

notice the title of the video! "Hardball with Chris Matthews 8112009 - How to Make A CIA Puppet Posing as A News Anchor Look Stupid"

description from the youtubes: We need more people like William on these shows to stand up against these NWO talking heads so that the world can see how much of a PSYOP (Psychological Operation) game the Mainstream Media is playing on our minds! This is a total win for the freedom loving, constitutional supporting good guys!

around 2:30 matthews starts really getting on his shit "why'd you bring a goddamn GUN to a presidential event?!!"

protestor: "who'd be silly enough to carry an unloaded firearm?"

nancy grace is truly the worst person on cable. worse than hannity, worse than greta, worse than tucker carlson, EVEN FUCKING WORSE THAN GERALDO. i mean, none of those people explicitly exploit dead children.

― heave pho (J0rdan S.), Tuesday, August 11, 2009 6:55 PM (1 hour ago)
Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

just dead soldiers

progressive insurance, proctor & gamble, geico, sargento, couple other companies have pulled their ads from glenn beck thanks to this campaign. i don't personally know how ad buys work or if stuff just gets moved around. still.

http://www.colorofchange.org/beck/

found out via oh no they didn't - political which is really my #1 source for newz. also the commenters brought it today:

HOW DO YOU LIKE THE FREE MARKET NOW, BECK?
HE'LL GET NEW ADS WITH HIS BOOTSTRAPS

sargento

as president of this famous cheese company, i decided that i could no longer support glenn beck's cable news program

xpost stop me if i've said this before, but there are some women who just have this look, you know it when you see it, that makes me think they secretly hunt, kill and devour small animals with their bare hands when nobody is looking. rodents, mostly. nancy grace is one of those women. kimberly guilfoyle, i suspect her as well.

test screenname: dario sargento

stop me if i've said this before

Wouldn't dream of stopping you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYbqZf53hHk

UH

wow what a fucking piece of shit asshole

seriously, just a out & out piece of shit for doing that

urge to kill...rising...

that this shit plays in Peoria makes me so angry and sad all at once it actually wears me out.

sloooooow news day = live coverage of medal of freedom ceremony (don't worry, there is some CONTROVERSY and fox news is on the case!) followed by shep talking about college football again

people are all angry and PO'ed at ben cardin's town hall meeting & i thought, how is this happening in montgomery county? then remembered he's a senator now & of course ventured out to the western part of the state where scary and weird stuff might happen.

this guy's hair is amazing!
http://i30.tinypic.com/2n8zss3.jpg

grover norquist wants you to know that obama will nationalize health care, destroy the health insurance industry, and deny your right to see a doctor, and every day obama has a bad day, the market will do better.

cavuto challenged this with a few pointed questions about.. oh, wait, he never does that

glenn beck has this person to explain you stuff about czars and heath care

http://i31.tinypic.com/2r2y6gn.jpg

idk

note the rightwing t-shirt saying "another typical white person"

scarbs and company try to figure out WTH beck is talking about yesterday, when beck drew this giant conspiracy tree that even his guests didn't understand and started going on about eugenics and the master race

I need the complete original show for this one to see the original context for Beck lines like this:

"the people underneath this in the root system, one is a communist, and they believe in forced abortions, legal rights for animals, and babies not human! (sarcasm) ok that doesn't sound too nuts to me'

i will investigate! don't get your hopes up as far as the context providing.. context

the shep is very excited about this news of nasa still not knowing about many asteroids and other things floating in space that may hit the earth and kill us all. be afraid!

which reminds me, the daily beast had some intern sit there and assemble all these clips of the report on apollo 40th anniversary getting kind of loopy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d1IjynDZ-U

fox report pointing out that yes, there are some craaaaaaaaazy people out there

http://i31.tinypic.com/mavy52.jpg

o'reilly declares that the white house is after fox news, and advises that the best way for democrats and obama in particular to turn around public opinion is.. to appear on this show called the o'reilly factor

http://i26.tinypic.com/fz7zv6.jpg

so this is part of o'reilly's MO i guess, attack a person until you can get him/her on the show, because all s/he has to do to stop the attacks is to go on the show. ratings! also extortion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13_9KESJh1A

pretty amazing

he's taking his lead from Alex Jones' line of documentaries, which for a long time has been too fantastic for most people. Beck's trying to popularise it, but when he gabs his way through the main talking points, whatdoyouknow it STILL SOUNDS CRAZY

http://infowars-shop.stores.yahoo.net/endgamedvd.html

ok rented that Endgame documentary. Turns out to be about the Bilderbergs, speculation about their aims and the history of Eugenics. It's extremely well edited and hypnotic for something this paranoid, it's like a version of Craig Baldwin's 'Tribulation 99' made by people who actually mean what they're saying. Ending worth transcribing: (read in creepy voice w/ minor key orchestral music)

"And the Georgia Guidestones stand today as a testament to the Elite's sacred mission. To have a two class system, where the underclass are forced to live as slaves in tiny enclosed cities, while the elite enjoy the land of the earth, evolve into Superhumans with the aid of advanced implantable technologies, live eternal lives, and travel throughout the Cosmos. THIS is the promise given to the members of the new world order, and the agenda of the Bilderberg group."

― Milton Parker, Tuesday, November 11, 2008 3:07 AM (9 months ago) Bookmark

(each one of those sentence fragments is accompanied by 2-3 second visual fades illustrating the underground cities, the subcutaneous chips, hordes of mindless slaves staring at a monitor crossfaded into an closeup image of lindsey lohan, davinci supermen travelling the cosmos, etc)

― Milton Parker, Tuesday, November 11, 2008 3:15 AM (9 months ago) Bookmark

http://www.thegeorgiaguidestones.com/half_a_billion.htm

ah, the bilderbergs. of course. substitute ACORN and "community organizers" in beck's case, which is code for "people of color"

god, fuck these people. this stopped being funny a long time ago and will result in the next american civil war. after obama's assasinated they'll all be against the wall as they all fully deserve to be, but it'll be too late for the rest of us by then.

i'm completely serious btw. some idiot redneck's going to blow obama away and his blood will be on the hands of everyone who's ever worked for fox news. when that happens this country will rip itself apart. do they not realize this? or maybe they do and just don't care? it makes me sad and angry, and i can't find this thread at all funny because of that.

oh man, their expressions as beck goes off are amazing

'why would the green people be doing this? may I make a connection and see if anyone goes with it? ... forced sterilizations, forced abortions, how many people in the green movement think that people are a virus? I think THAT'S a CONNECTION! ... Anybody?'

well, there are a lot of people who work at fox news. i don't hold everyone at the NYT accountable for judith miller's work re: iraq and WMDs. but yeah, i expect some anti-government extremists will do something somewhere. beck told his viewers v seriously a week or so ago that if there's another tim mcveigh type person that would ruin everything they were trying to build. now why would you tell your audience that, if you weren't getting indications that some of them might pop off?
Officials see rise in militia groups across U.S.

WASHINGTON – Militia groups with gripes against the government are regrouping across the country and could grow rapidly, according to an organization that tracks such trends.
The stress of a poor economy and a liberal administration led by a black president are among the causes for the recent rise, the report from the Southern Poverty Law Center says. Conspiracy theories about a secret Mexican plan to reclaim the Southwest are also growing amid the public debate about illegal immigration.
Bart McEntire, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, told SPLC researchers that this is the most growth he's seen in more than a decade.
"All it's lacking is a spark," McEntire said in the report.

but then he turns around and talks about eugenics as though that's something that will actually fucking happen. it's hideously irresponsible, and if he tells his audience not to bomb or shoot anybody one day and then saying how obama's going to kill your grandmother the other four days of the days...well, which message is going to have a bigger impact?

high speed police chase in los angeles -> white male suspect in standoff -> fbi, secret service involved -> federal building evacuated

death panels -> "preposterous and absolutely false"

thank you shep.

this stuff is not news, and the "town hall" freakshows are manna from heaven for the do-littles.

saw your name next to this in the new answers and knew it was gonna be awesome!

just goes to show that you can get anything and I do mean anything in the "news" in august.

http://i27.tinypic.com/ff1n4w.jpg

haaa

yeah. it was something about mysterious "connections" between business leaders and the obama white house and how no one connected the dots on these connections and the giant web of CONSPIRACY going on here, that only glenn beck can explain you.

my thoughts are, the reason no one's connected the dots on there being connections between business leaders and politicians is DUH! NO SHIT, SHERLOCK

yeah, seriously. that they should say that after 8 years of bush/cheney is infuriating.

gah, now i remember why i don't watch this shit.

The Economy as a Bathtub
Steve Doocy explains the heady concept of spending money using a bathtub and rubber ducks.

http://i28.tinypic.com/t9a2dg.jpg

running joke on studio b/fox report where they pick up local news stories about bears, just so they can play this clip of a bear falling onto a trampoline again

and now you know the news!

san dimas bear pool news crawl rules

obama town hall in montana. let's applaud max baucus, for keeping health care negotiations secret from his fellow dems to the point where they were speculating in The Hill about whether to remove him from his chairmanship

looooooooool "give it up for jon tester!"

i like town hall policy wonk obama a lot more than grand, sweeping political speech obama

bill clinton was on point last night @ netroots nation keynote, saying look, the real danger is if we do *nothing* about health care. the status quo *is* the danger.

good stuff from obama here. somebody must've figured out that people actually pay attention when you talk about how insurance companies cancelling policies for preexisting conditions is a big problem.

NEWS ALERT:
OBAMA: MEDICARE IS A GOVERNMENT PROGRAM

state of the discussion does, indeed, make it necessary to tell people this. "the government can't run anything, and keep your hands off my medicare!"

re: some tax increases on those making 250K+ - "we gotta get over this notion that we can get something for nothing, because that's how we got into this massive debt in the first place"

obama OTM

taking a few more shots at "some of these cable shows" where people are yelling about how we can't afford this. bill o'reilly will be taking this personally, no doubt. be afraid!

cavuto hitting the point over and over alleging obama/dems have made insurance companies the 'new villain' and brings on dana perino first to attack obama, of course, and the poor insurance companies have gotten a bait-and-switch

has there ever been an occasion when cavuto had the opportunity to be critical of big business, and actually took it? like, ever?

journalism!

i really think neil cavuto is among the worst on fox, because he's allegedly a journalist doing a news show, and i'll be damned if he's ever spoken truth to power ONCE when the power in question was either big business or any conservative or republican.

he had some dem strategist on after perino and was all over his case, challenging everything and interrupting, but at the same time only coming at the guy with this vague 'i looked at the numbers and they don't add up, i checked my spreadsheet and was about to throw it out the window.' so you can't even refute him on facts, since he doesn't want to respond to specific facts, only refer to them in a vague way so he can continue to assert that obama's plan won't work.

i hate to cast aspersions like this, but come on. like cavuto really did serious homework himself, and isn't just working off talking points from whatever conservative organizations & gop communications staffers are sending his producers through the back channels.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIP7hYqeegQ

megyn kelly's producers helpfully focus the issue by cropping out dingell's response to the man at the meeting, which was also on tape. guy alleges that "thugs" know where he lives and come visit him in the middle of the night. kelly doesn't ask for many details or specifics & throws the guy some softballs.. then they clip a video of dingell after the event and state that his comments were specifically directed at this one guy. fair and balanced!

i'm sorry, just because his son is ill and he brought his son to a meeting in order to get in a congressman's face and yell at him - this doesn't make him right. you'd think a lawyer (kelly) would recognize what's going on here.

(video is referenced in this op-ed: In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition)

imho we could use a more precise definition of the term 'crazy,' i don't think the way it's used all over the place is too helpful

so this BS about 'death panels' has obviously made its way into the mainstream and is on every tv show all day. it's being debunked by a lot of reporters now, but i heard some panel @ sunday chat show yesterday all impressed by how palin got this started, via one stupid dishonest facebook post, because even if it was dishonest.. zomg! she threw the white house off message!

so.. obama administration, blame "the media" for the lies getting out there. if you are the media, blame "conservative media" or "cable news." if you are cable news, blame "talk radio." if you are a gop official caught misleading the public, blame the far left if you can (grassley, earlier today), blame both parties equally for misleading the public if you must.

seems there are all these weird unspoken rules about who you can and can't call out by name, and rules against stating that lies are, in fact, lies. i noticed chuck todd earlier saying the death panels thing circulated on talk radio, & the shep's said a couple times that health care misinformation was from talk radio, because i guess he either ignores, or can't say, that guests on cavuto are free to spout this stuff unchallenged every day, and beck and hannity constantly book professional liars on their shows. (i'm not sure how it helps conservatives in the long run to encourage their base to continue departing from facts and reality.)

my thoughts re why you can't call someone a liar:

nobody is ever seriously punished in the political/media elites for doing something wrong, screwing up, or failing; once you're in, you're in (except sex stuff and then only maybe), that's the iron law: no one is ever punished --> since everbody in the game is always going to be in the game, you may need something from someone in the future; OR you know already you will never succeed in ousting someone from their perch by accurately describing what it is they did, and you will certainly run into them again in the future --> all drama must remain at the level of symbolism, consequences fall elsewhere --> never call anyone a liar, you only look like a chump.

anyway daria i hope you can give us the rundown on how FNC covers delay's time on dancing with the stars

not long ago was a discussion with judge napolitano, about the US trying to go after people with swiss bank accounts who aren't paying their US taxes. i didn't really understand, except napolitano says there is some constitutional issue getting in the way (he always thinks this about everything). shep says this must be because the government is broke and looking for $$$ wherever they can find it, and "they could always just tax weed and then they wouldn't have to go through this." i am pretty sure legalizing + taxing weed has been raised numerous times on this show as a solution to revenue problems. but you know if that happened, there would be endless complaints about how stupid it is for cities and states to keep raising taxes on weed.

nobody has mentioned tom delay yet. is 'dancing with the stars' on fox broadcast? if so, it'll come up sometime today no doubt.

earlier: report released on space aliens in the UK
just now: dealerships using monster trucks to crush "clunkers" traded in from this program. <3 monster trucks. seems like a win all round, really.
next up: 90% bills in the US have something on them, what could it be? (btw, the answer is cocaine. i expect legalizing + taxing it won't be proposed in this case but you never know.)

still no dancing with the stars, but aliens, monster trucks, NFL, and coke all in the same show? KUDOS

i usually never ever would comment on this, but courtney friel, reporter on various things, is very blonde, very perfectly coiffed, very made up, very tan, and wearing a bright pink sundress with big white polka dots today.

that glenn beck is doing an extra special special with a studio audience, on the DEATH OF SMALL BUSINESS in america, being CRUSHED by the government, a government with blood on its hands. be afraid! i expect he doesn't have anyone in that studio who disagrees with anything he says. seems somehow essential to glenn beck world, that nobody who fundamentally disagrees with him ever sets foot in it.

plan of attack thus far: cap and trade, unions/EFCA, i expect health care reform is next.
straight propaganda

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZltKUEWXIVk

what do you want to bet dude with the assault rifle in this video is a GOP plant, just waiting for the secret service to intervene so they can all wail about how obama's going to take away your guns.

most interesting thing so far today: the shep vs WH spox bill burton re: public option. daaaaaaaaaaaamn.

"the left of your party is LIVID! did you watch MSNBC last night?!" "people voted for this president because he SAID it was ESSENTIAL! now suddenly because the republicans are running around, calling this an end-of-the-world death panel for grandma, all of a sudden it's no longer essential?!"

i guess he got my emails XD

via some conservative blog where everyone hates both these guys & is convinced shep is all pissed off because the liberals aren't winning this battle. he does manage to out-livid everyone on MSNBC in this particular clip. right on.

yo morbs! you asked for it! maddow and taibbi on the death of the public option: NO WE CAN'T
(skip to 8:15 here for the start of taibbi)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qcx8zbg0r4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH2EhP-5H0Q

tom delay plays HARDBALL! holds up one of the dancing shoes & says he is disappointed because a texan doesn't wear these kinds of shoes with the heels. matthews asks him if he'd be a little light in those shoes.

classy

delay then says he'd like to get rid of medicare, and that medicare, medicaid, and s-chip are responsible for driving up the costs of health care.

then, when pressed on this birther thing, delay says he'd like the president to produce his birth certficate, and that illegal aliens in the US have to produce their birth certificate, why can't the president produce his?

your former majority leader, ladies and gentlemen. i'm against gratuitously calling people crazy because of views they hold but THIS MAN IS CRAZY

or just politicallyl savvy. he knows how that shit'll play down home.

heard on the npr that state/irs have succeeded in getting switzerland to help re: going after US residents who put money in swiss banks and don't pay taxes on it. i expect judge napolitano to freak out soon about the constitution being trampled on. i appreciate the judge sometimes, since he is adamantly against the government spying on citizens, torturing people, and detaining them indefinitely, but then he gets kind of paranoid IMHO - the white house screwing up something with sending people unsolicited emails =/ the white house putting together a nixon-style 'enemies list.'

now maybe i am not too smart and what seemed like a completely new idea to me is, in fact, stunningly obvious, but.. about all these people utterly obsessed with the constitution like beck, michelle bachmann, the judge, the tea partiers, the 9-12ers. the fundamental point of departure for them is not that the government is making policies and passing laws they don't like. the point of departure is that the government is disregarding the constitution, and is therefore illegitimate. and then what do you do? stockpile weapons? and if the government is illegitimate, does it matter who won or lost an election? the outcome of an election is kind of beside the point, isn't it, if you're glenn beck and think the leadership of this country is defying the constitution. and your group might be approximately 3% of registered voters, but that doesn't matter if you're operating at the level of: the government is illegitimate and we are the only ones defending the constitution.

ok white house. guys. look. it is kind of a bad plan to change direction on an issue, then blame the news media for reporting that you did it, and then say.. you only suggested you'd drop the public option to see if you could get GOP support and make it a bipartisan bill. wait, what? after spending all day yesterday telling the media that nothing ever changed & they just reported it wrong? but wait, didn't they backtrack again today and say they want to do this bipartisan thing? and now he's meeting with religious leaders? a terrible and misguided idea imho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzaYnpbXGqQ
"STOP IT!" o_O looooool

robert gibbs can get a little condescending. i think tapper gets wayyy too much shit in general, he does a pretty good job imho.

msnbc is all keen on replaying this clip of barney frank snarking on some poor lady at one of these town hall meetings. her comparison of obama to hitler is obv idiotic so there's no argument here, but in general - where did this idea that barney frank is funny come from? i've never found him to be particularly funny. of course fox has played frank's answer out of context as if he responded that way to someone with a serious question.

i tried watching this ed show (well, listening to it), and i don't get it. he doesn't seem terribly well-informed.

talking points memo has more details of the crazy from tom delay on the hardball

haaa just comin here with some tpm delay business. what a sociopath

Can You Help on This One?
from TPM by Josh Marshall

We're kind of curious whether this really happened or whether it's just from some dream reverie brought on by too much dance practice. But when asked this evening whether he was surprised by recent town hall antics Tom DeLay told Chris Matthews that at one of his town halls in the 1980s protestors "brought quadriplegics in on gurneys and dumped them on the floor in front of my podium."

That sounds pretty out there.

We've done a little research and we cannot find any press reports about such a bizarre and somewhat hard to credit event. And DeLay's office has not responded to requests for comment.

Anybody help us on this one?

yeah i got nothing. it's a good thing they have a segment on the hardball called 'the sideshow' because today was all circus. the dude on prior to delay was from some gun owners' group, and after being pressed by matthews about it, said he would indeed be in favor of letting people carry firearms into presidential events. i'm bothered on a level here, on the one hand it's fair to be dogged about this, on the other, is it really a good idea to go on at length about the history of political assassinations in this country (which matthews did)

also this:

After speaking at a preventive-care conference here last week, he was swarmed by protesters. Or, in Mr. Baucus’s words, “agitators, whose sole goal was to intimidate, disrupt and not let any meaningful conversation go on.” There were a couple of people in the crowd “with YouTubes,” Mr. Baucus added (meaning cameras), and he posited that the agitators were paid and probably from out of state.

if i were a guest on the factor, every time o'reilly asked me why anything, i'd answer, 'just to piss you off, bill.'

'why is nbc comparing protestors to terrorists?' 'just to piss you off, bill.'
'why is president obama holding conference calls with religious leaders?' 'just to piss you off, bill.'
'why is fox news way ahead in the ratings?' 'just to piss you off, bill.'

because what's he going to do, get pissed off? then i'd be like, 'see, bill? i told you so.'

i guess the shep's facebook page said something about a shout-out on fox report to their facebook fans.

which was: the show ending with a very reluctant 'you know facebook? we're like, on facebook now, so if you want to search for shepard smith or whatever, you can do that. but it's not really necessary.'

come on now, this is the one guy on fox who most of the greater interwebs actually doesn't hate.

i wonder in general what the strategery minds at the fox news channel are thinking about social media and the interwebs. msnbc might be losing out in the TV ratings by a wide margin, but msnbc & cnn both *kill* fox as far as web traffic goes, and msnbc video in particular is very easy to find, can be embedded in its own player, and gets tons of plays. meanwhile fox's website is badly organized, hard to navigate, etc.

they have to care about tv news audiences getting older, while younger people are turning to the interwebs for news. i don't know why i find myself rooting for fox news to get better at new media. but they'd be heck of entertaining if they did.

wtf, Barney Frank is pretty much always funny!

i haven't ever laughed at anything he's said as i recall

obama is funny though. the clintons are too, hillary has some bad jokes in speeches, but when she's just talking off the cuff she can be very funny.

o'reilly says hey, here is a picture of me modeling the official o'reilly factor "PATRIOT" hat you can buy on our website, real macho, i might wear it in san francisco or vermont

it's stuff like this, & matthews' casual little joke earlier, that makes me look forward to the day when people from their generation have retired from tv news.

tpm followup to the delay thing yesterday. sometimes the url is the best punchline

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/08/did_delays_angry_quadriplegic_protesters_tale_add.php

(obama) taking a few more shots at "some of these cable shows" where people are yelling about how we can't afford this. bill o'reilly will be taking this personally, no doubt. be afraid!

oreilly did, in fact, take it personally

fox WH correspondent garrett patiently explains to o'reilly that the white house does, indeed, take his questions

o'reilly bloviates about the white house picking a fight with fox & how it gets fox more ratings & on and on

garrett looks bored. says all the cable networks thinks obama is talking about them & that when the white house is trying to disseminate information, every administration has preferred outlets & for obama, obv, fox is not one of them

i guess it is shrewd of o'reilly to pretend that of allllll the things going on in the world right now, the white house is, in fact, preoccupied by fox news. ailes probably clued him in though.

UH
Bill O'Reilly Describes His Men's Room Encounter With Spike Lee (VIDEO)

scarbs is rude to capehart about his fashion choices, capehart is all like, whatever, they're prada

http://i25.tinypic.com/33u8js5.jpg

http://i30.tinypic.com/1zg9oxg.jpg

glenn beck, information architect XD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh_JXJoV2Yo

want fast food news? fox report!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYWDdnDr9H0

it's necessary for a good conspiracy theory to be ever more vast and intricate, yes? focusing and asking precise questions is the exact wrong thing to do. if beck wants to send his audience off into the weeds for the next eight years, well, all right then. and for the leading conspiracy theorist, mr beck, suddenly i see that not knowing what he's talking about is.. an asset.

QUESTION WITH BOLDNESS AND SPEAK WITH OUT FEAR

dont even want to imagine what were going to get from fox commentators today about kennedy

fox is just not covering it full-time like msnbc is, msnbc is a nonstop kennedy wake. fox coverage is good from what i've seen. i've only had it on for the past few hours. it's been more of 'here is the legislation he passed that actually affects your life,' some comments from republicans (all positive). many noting how kennedy actually got along with conservatives irl & sort of lamenting how politics has changed.

at msnbc this morning there was more of a worshipful tone about the convergence of public service and liberal values and this one family's history and legacy, all of these things together, that goes completely lauded and unquestioned. i have a bit of an impression of noblesse oblige from this msnbc coverage. fox has been more down-to-earth.

wow - smith just now remarks on the vicious emails & internet comments, and asks why kennedy has been so demonized by the far right, d. brinkley (guest) responds by explaining the roots of it are in kennedy's work to destroy jim crow laws and his civil rights activism.

woah, i wouldn't even make that argt

wow indeeed

far as i remember, brinkley was talking historically about the *start* of the vitriol - why kennedy became such a target for the far-right in the first place. but yeah it was remarkable imho.

speculating, but watching studio b just now, i had the sense they had gotten a LOT of hate mail. wrapped up by saying both dems/republicans said that kennedy was in fact just trying to help people, and was a good man.

glenn beck show is utterly poisonous

i wonder how many minority races are employed on the glenn beck show, either tv or radio

"you are about to lose your free speech in your country. do you disagree with that?" - this guy's style is no different than any extremely successful cult leader. i def understand why ppl who don't know better get totally brainwashed by him.

rush on beck

i wonder how many minority races are employed on the glenn beck show, either tv or radio

I was kind of boggling at the Fox News store in the Minneapolis airport last weekend as it was staffed entirely by immigrants from various African nations.

i don't think that counts

True, but there's still something that feels really wrong about pasty traveling business dudes buying their copies of AN INCONVENIENT BOOK from Somali women in headscarves.

yes, i agree

eh, a huge portion of people who work at fox news--not just on studio b but on cavuto, fox & friends, probably on oreilly and even hannity and beck--arent hardcore conservatives by any means. i mean probably the number of people who work for the network who actually agree with hannity is fairly low. the fact is... there arent enough jobs for ppl in the industry--from producers to grips--especially not jobs that pay as well as fox does (id imagine)--for it to be something worth taking a stand over. and like in most businesses, id say the majority of people are ultimately just sort of apathetic.

i def understand why ppl who don't know better get totally brainwashed by him.

― sailor goon (J0rdan S.), Wednesday, August 26, 2009 9:27 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

apart from the party-line towing, he is the only one on the left or right speaking with the appropriate level of outrage concerning September 2008. Especially in contrast to Obama's increasingly mired centrism, I can see the profound appeal of Beck's 'revolutionary' populism, it's just that masterful little pivot point on the concept of which exact institution needs to be taken out

yeah i have no doubt.

i wonder more about the people actually talking on camera/on radio & how they can say some of the stuff they do, in front of their coworkers.

xpost - you mean the bailouts? that's why i like ratigan, who in addition, seems to deal in facts and reality. unfortunately he's on at such a weird hour most ppl don't watch him.

sept 08 is just kind of my shorthand for the economic meltdown hitting home with most people's 401k's and savings were eaten by 33-50%, the reflexive bailouts were just the surreal punchline

sarah palin sez watch glenn beck!

yeah, i worry about her a little bit doncha know. the lady has no establishment advisors to tell her how to kinda sorta stay within the lines or what to do next, so she turns on the tv & is like wow, glenn beck! he GETS it!

i mean, if i were to imagine who'd be in beck's audience, i'd picture regular jane six-pack, lives in rural america, sees the economy going to shit, doesn't trust obama, hates government, gets all mad, thinks she has no one to talk to who understands, turns on the tv, and says wow, glenn beck! he GETS it!

i picture that, then i say to myself, this person was the VICE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE

I caught a little bit of Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough talking about Kennedy and gun control and it got a little stupid.

I mean, yes, technically he lost two brothers to gun violence...

apparently Glenn Beck hasn't mentioned Ted Kennedy's death yet.

beck going all-in on attacking van jones

i guess he's accusing people of being communists and radicals again. played a clip of jeremiah wright. demands obama answer if he believes white people are poisoning immigrants and people of color, because apparently that's what he's accusing jones of believing. i didn't research whatever beck took out of context there, so i can't explain

what depresses me about this shit is.. it's not just candidates for senate/potus/scotus any more. any level of political appointees are subject to being smeared by cable hosts with audiences of millions.

http://i26.tinypic.com/2e55aua.jpg

i am reminded of this commenter on dem. underground who was like, i've really been enjoying watching glenn beck lately, because i get to find out about all the awesome people who are finally getting heard at the white house

oh this is a v good interview with rachel maddow. <3 maddow

http://gothamist.com/2009/04/24/rachel_maddow_talk_show_host.php

fox report on h1n1 notes 'no touching' rule instituted in NYC schools to keep flu from spreading. shep: 'no fist bumps.. terrorist or otherwise'

hahahaha (ref: a terrorist fist jab???)

sloooooooooow news day on studio b is hilarious. the shepard doesn't even try to not look completely bored and annoyed as they kill the last 10 min with segments on: alleged bigfoot spotting in poland, the death of the world's oldest dog, and ('and then there's this.. and then, mercifully, it ends') the japanese pm's wife saying her soul took a UFO to venus

'cavuto, what do you have? because around here it went right off the tracks and into a ravine'

it's like listening to joel and the bots 3/4 of the way into some interminably dull 50s scifi feature when they give up on trying to be funny & are just like WHY ISN'T THIS OVER YET

polish bigfoot video is hilar btw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzSY2r993Mw

hah, i am not the only one who noticed
http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/funny/the_weirdest_five_minutes_of_our_day_130154.asp

the funny thing about the tvnewser site, i am convinced that most every regular commenter on there has made up a persona that is a complete pisstake. especially the fox news & msnbc stans who are so over-the-top that they've got to be parody. but they don't realize everyone they're responding to is also a complete pisstake

this evening in pictures

chief nerd correspondent goes on tour with the tea party express, in TEXAS. some lady starts yelling into the mic about how this was socialism and how could the government just ram health care down their throats and etc.
http://i26.tinypic.com/23hsrd5.jpg
http://i28.tinypic.com/2njdmj5.jpg

hannity plays an adorably hokey video in which many people at fox news trash talk about college football. fake head exploding doocy is a highlight
http://i25.tinypic.com/20z8w3p.jpg
http://i29.tinypic.com/n4tvkp.jpg

i feel left out, my college just had a bunch of pot smoking hippies, no football team at all. rooting for wvu but i guess they aren't going to be too good this year.

the pundit shows are all about being gravely concerned about mr van jones. so ridiculous. i suppose some of the lefty rhetoric doesn't play all that great on the national stage but i dont find anything too remarkable about it, obama better stick with him..

lolololol @ Shep and his beloved Rebels. Ole Miss fans are insanely awesome in that they can reimagine any season, no matter how dismal, where Ole Miss ends up nat'l champs. "if we hadn't gotten screwed on that offensive interference call in the 3rd quarter of the Alabama game, we woulda been SEC Western Div champs. We practically beat LSU, if only <wide reciever> hadn't been injured, and LSU beat Florida, so by the transitive property we obviously would've one the NCAA. I mean, we were practically national champions, guys!" (nevermind the 4-8 record)

http://i28.tinypic.com/2lnuye0.jpg
http://i27.tinypic.com/2exq8ts.jpg

via those crazy kids at ohnotheydidnt- political <3

Charlie Brooker gave me much-needed LOLs with a point yesterday:

At last weekend's Edinburgh TV festival, the annual MacTaggart Lecture was delivered by Niles Crane from Frasier, played with eerie precision by James Murdoch. His speech attacked the BBC, moaned about Ofcom and likened the British television industry to The Addams Family. It went down like a turd in a casserole. Still, the Addams Family reference will have been well-considered because James knows a thing or two about horror households: he's the son of Rupert Murdoch, which makes him the closest thing the media has to Damien from The Omen. That's a fatuous comparison, obviously. Damien Thorn, offspring of Satan, was educated at Yale before inheriting a global business conglomerate at a shockingly young age and using it to hypnotise millions in a demonic bid to hasten Armageddon. James Murdoch's story is quite different. He went to Harvard.

Above all, Murdoch's speech was a call for the BBC's online news service to be curbed, scaled back, deleted, depleted, dragged to the wastebasket, and so on, because according to him, the dispersal of such free "state-sponsored" news on the internet threatens the future of other journalistic outlets. Particularly those provided by News International, which wants to start charging for the online versions of its papers. Yes, Thorn - I mean, Murdoch - refers to the BBC as "state-sponsored media", because that makes it sound bad (although not quite as bad as "Satan-sponsored media", admittedly). He evoked the goverment's control of the media in Orwell's 1984, and claimed that only commercial news organisations were truly capable of producing "independent news coverage that challenges the consensus". I guess that's what the News Of The World does when it challenges the consensus view that personal voicemails should remain personal, or that concealing a video camera in a woman's private home bathroom is sick and creepy (it magically becomes acceptable when she's Kerry Katona).

Another great example of independent consensus-challenging news coverage is America's Fox News network, home of bellicose human snail Bill O'Reilly and blubbering blubberball Glenn Beck. Beck - who has the sort of rubbery, chucklesome face that should ideally be either a) cast as the goonish sidekick in a bad frat house sex comedy or b) painted on a toilet bowl so you could shit directly on to it - has become famous for crying live on air, indulging in paranoid conspiracy theorising, and labelling Obama a "racist" with "a deep-seated hatred for white people or white culture". As a news source, Fox is about as plausible and useful as an episode of Thundercats. Still, at least by hiring Beck, they've genuinely challenged the stuffy consensus notion that people should only really be given their own show on a major news channel if they're sane.

The trouble is, once you've gasped or chuckled over the YouTube clips of his most demented excesses, he's actually incredibly boring: a fat clown with one protracted trick. His show consists of an hour of screechy, hectoring bullshit: a pudgy middle-aged right-winger sobbing into his shirt about how powerless he feels. It's an incredible performance, but it belongs in some kind of zoo, not on a news channel. But that's the Murdoch way.

Now there's a lengthy, valid, and boring debate to be had about the scope and suitability of some of the BBC's ambitions but, quite frankly, if their news website (a thing of beauty and a national treasure) helps us stave off the arrival of the likes of Beck - even tangentially, even only for another few years until the Tories take over and begin stealthily dismantling the Beeb while a self-interested press loudly eggs them on - then it deserves to be cherished and applauded. To finish his speech, Murdoch claimed, "The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit." Or to put it another way: greed is good. Then he clopped off stage on his cloven hooves, guffing out a hot cloud of sulphur as he left.

the olbermann is crowdsourcing @ dailykos for dirt on beck

this is all so silly.

i have actually been watching some olbermann lately, the more serious parts of the show. the guy is wicked smart and a really talented broadcaster, and regrettably he just can't get beyond his ego to have any empathy for points of view other than his own. not saying he should have it for beck, just in general

it just dawned on me who has to be REALLY pissed off about this. bill o'reilly! he is SO over. hah

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/08/keith-olbermann-calls-for-oppo-research-on-glenn-beck-others-at-fox/
Once the game of oppo research on the press begins, it’s hard to tell where it might stop, no?

i agree actually. it's so narcissistic.

also, this is old but kelly's court is a treat. she's sassy
http://video.aol.com/video-detail/americas-newsroom-soft-core/216172827151548352

http://i26.tinypic.com/2zhfxib.jpg

http://i29.tinypic.com/2guflgp.jpg

i know which show id rather watch here

msnbc is replaying the broadcast of the today show from the morning of 9-11. really interesting to watch. it seems an unconfirmed report that a bomb went off at the state department, and an unconfirmed report that another plane (after the pentagon) was headed for downtown washington, were broadcast on the national tv news. i thought those were just rumors going around my office (was at work @ downtown dc at the time), but it explains why by around 10:30am my boss was like O_O we're closing, everyone go home.

i remember a report of at least one car bomb in DC

yep, exactly. i thought it was just people talking but turns out, katie couric reported it over the air. i guess it was called an unconfirmed report or something, but anyway, now i know why we were all like oh shit, i hope nothing else blows up.

(doubtless beck will be on the air tomorrow going on about how wonderful and united everyone felt on 9-12, which is a complete lie, and my recollection is: we don't really even know who did this, the army is deployed on the streets of georgetown, there are jets and military helicopters flying at all hours, and shit, i hope nothing else blows up. i also recall thinking i really do not trust bush to handle this, so i am sure this proves to beck that i hate america)

I stood in line at a McDonald's in lower Manhattan on the afternoon of 9/11 and listened to a couple of ex-frat boys talk about killing towel-heads. Then they ordered a "fuh-jit-a" or something equally mispronounced. I went back to my friend's dorm and didn't come out til midnight.

The next day I was mostly concerned with getting back across the river to where I lived.

CAR CHASE

http://i26.tinypic.com/2gvtvd1.jpg

awesome

its not that crazy now he appears to be actually stopping for traffic lights, but still running from the po-lice

LA has car chases every week, right

pic of shep is classic. "yup. a sliver dodge. goin, oh, 50-55 i guess. fifteen minutes folks."

she? ok getting out of the car, i guess that's it. not very exciting

person was doing like 110 on the highway

oh ok. exciting!

idk what to say about the 9/11 report they did after being kicked abt 15 min later into the program because of live police chase, other than, this is cable news. now back to being all serious and somber, which is fine, that's what they do on this subject. personally i really appreciated gawker posts on this today, also the fact that the current administration is not using the event to throw accusations at political opponents.

followed by report on whatever coast guard exercise scared the news media today, in which the green screen behind the pentagon correspondent suddenly flips photos, going to black, then a picture of random people, then a picture of union station. "so we can put a picture of clowns behind you if we want & you won't even know it?"

also, news you can use: after a few rounds, people working in the markets will tell you they are freaking out about what might happen in october, whatever that may be, because the banks just used the cash to buy up more banks and it all might go to shit again. "the only thing getting me to wall st is 2 for one drinks"

very serious conversation about afghanistan with chris wallace winds up with trash talking about how the redskins are gonna lose to the giants and how the best football watching experience in america is at.. ole miss. goes on until the producer actually cuts them off with a commercial

quality hour of cable news right there. never forget/afghanistan war/financial disaster vs. car chase/drinks/football

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

beck in his maudlin way telling us all NEVER FORGET and playing some dramatic video montage

uh no, you do not get to piously co-opt this event to prop up your rightwing agenda, any more. sorry!
this is just nauseating.

Beck crying about how we dont die building stuff anymore. Pretty solid.

a bunch of fox news shows all making a big thing about ACORN story in which some conservative activist goes to offices with secret video camera, and says he wants to get funding to run a prostitution ring. finally we get a picture of the guy & his fellow activist supposedly dressed as a hooker:

http://i28.tinypic.com/2nas3k9.jpg

are you kidding me??!! is that one of the manning brothers?! i mean, were the office workers thinking 'ok this guy is ridiculous and clearly will never do such a thing, let's just be polite and tell him whatever so he'll go away' and then when he left were like.. SMH, what was THAT

fucker looks like asher roth

i mean, i am sure we don't know the whole story here, but now i have to ask, isn't it possible that the very first thing that happened in these situations is.. the ACORN staffers looked at dude and immediately thought either this guy is a complete fool, or he is playing us for fools. i haven't watched the video though.

don't even want to spend the mental energy defending ACORN, and i'm not familiar enough with how it's organized to try. my limited understanding is that it's very decentralized. point is, no defense would matter, it's become the sum-of-all-fears boogeyman on the right.

wait a minute

that picture is impossible

I mean completely impossible

the only possible response is laughter, not outrage. I've only read headlines & transcripts of Beck's scree about taxpayer betrayal, and when I see a picture it's... that? how can this be?

i'm just obsessed with the issue of HOW did anyone take this dude seriously in that getup?! either the ACORN staffers or the bloggers calling him a genius or the news organizations reporting on this like it went down exactly as his (edited) video says it did?

ok also he is in the fox studios dressed like that, in that screenshot? i just.. i dunno.

ok on the youtubes if you search '2nd ACORN Tape' it's the one where they go to offices in DC and uh.. so, i watched the intro and felt embarrassed on behalf of these poor conservative kids. and then when they get to the offices and talk to the staffer my impression is.. the staffer is embarrassed for them too & is like, ok this is not my job, but i feel sorry for you, so here's a little advice.

no need to feel embarrassed for them, this stunt cost Acorn the Census gig and the senate voted away their funding

ok watching this I am impressed with the sheer amount of concerned straight-talk advice they got from these volunteers concerning their business plan. the thing's edited to shreds and I'm sure they removed every last bit of footage where the volunteers indicate that they know it's a joke -- so when the volunteers put in these 'caring' asides like 'what's your name? steve? that's my son's name, honey' it seems less like trying to break the ice and more like they're actually trying to take these two kids in these outfits seriously

this isn't journalism, this is entertainment, but it's having the same effect as journalism

only other thing that occurs to me, man that is one tiny tiny office with a vinyl drape Acorn logo for a storefront sign, behold the fearsome and insidious D.C. ACORN HEADQUARTERS

Ugh, my mom is in town visiting right now and she told me to watch this video and tell her what I think and then she went on to talk about how ACORN is corrupt because they get federal funding and advise this pimp guy on how to evade taxes or whatever and then she starts to talk about how "these black women, you know the kind i'm talking about, who just feel this sense of entitlement and want to help people cheat the system because all they want to do is coast on welfare their whole lives, you know what i mean, those BLACK women" at which point I gave her about the politest evil eye I could and told her "I'll check it out and get back to you."
To be honest the video just looks like some kind of fun opportunity for bored office women brainstorm advice to someone they know is hopeless, but I feel like my best option here is just to tell her I don't have the time to watch it and leave it at that.

yeah, maybe there are more here, idk, but the one ACORN office is on barracks row SE which is south of capitol hill, it's just a storefront. i haven't watched the videos from other offices but my impression from the DC video is definitely that the staffers are like, 'oh, honey.. no'

and just to speculate pointlessly here, what i might do if i were feeling irresponsible and unprofessional (which happens), and worked at a nonprofit where we had to deal with people who had serious problems, and some college students came in dressed like it was halloween and bullshitting us saying they were a pimp and a prostitute, i might be like "really. you should TOTALLY do that! you would be GREAT at running a prostitution ring. no, i MEAN it! and i LOVE your look, honey, who does your hair?"

i don't know, sometimes i want to help people cheat the system (not that i do, but you know, sometimes..) because the government gave trillions of public funds to the people on wall street who did it

jeez, what was I saying again? Inland woman caught up in national controversy over ACORN

ACORN employee Tresa Kaelke is shown meeting with them, telling them that she once was an escort and got away with killing her husband.

But Kaelke insisted Tuesday she made up her story for shock value.

Kaelke told the reporters that she made the story up, saying 'They were clearly playing with me... I decided to shock them as much as they were shocking me.'

...

Since she claimed on the video to have killed her husband, two San Bernardino police homicide detectives interviewed her at the office Tuesday.

Police said they have been in contact with Kaelke's former husbands and the homicide claims do not appear accurate.

...

San Bernardino resident Jim Miller, who lives near ACORN's office and is also featured in the video giving business advice, said he thought the "whole thing was a preposterous production."

He said he continued talking just to learn more.

Miller, a retired businessman, said he couldn't believe the people wanted to propose such a "ludicrous enterprise," but continued talking to them and asking questions to see where it would lead.

Amy Schur, ACORN's head organizer in California, said the video is selectively edited. Kaelke repeatedly said ACORN couldn't help the fake pimp and prostitute, but that does not appear on the video, Schur said.

Since she claimed on the video to have killed her husband, two San Bernardino police homicide detectives interviewed her at the office Tuesday.

Police said they have been in contact with Kaelke's former husbands and the homicide claims do not appear accurate.

that's some quality policework, detectives

uh-oh! judge napolitano thinks obama's health care bill is unconstitutional! (judge napolitano thinks everything that doesn't fit into his libertarian paradise is unconstitutional)

another reason to love the shep: he might be the only person on cable news who actually apologizes if he accidentally jumps in & cuts off someone while they are still talking. i can't understand why people cut each other off constantly on so many of these other shows. i've always regarded cutting off a person while they are talking as the height of rudeness, and it's so hard to watch on tv (cnn has pundits on all the time who do this without a second thought, chris matthews does this to everyone, bill o'reilly does it to everyone). it's my #1 pet peeve irl and if a person cuts me off while talking enough times, it's all i can do to restrain myself from throwing a fit and screaming at them, i get so angry. it is so. incredibly. rude. and defeats the purpose of having a discussion if it's only about getting your talking points out at a rapid-fire pace and jumping all over the other people before they get a chance to respond.

and yeah, i know it's not really about having a discussion on most of these cable shows, and the people who go on there are just trying to say what they want to say & don't listen to a word of what anyone else says. i actually don't mind watching the heavily right-leaning pundit panel on baier's 6pm show, because at LEAST they let each other finish a sentence.

^^ otm as heeeellll

except about baier and 6pm, whoever the f that is heh

AT 6pm cripes

special report is the 6pm show, used to be brit hume's until he retired. it is the fox evening news at the speed that your grandparents can deal with, then at 7pm shep is on and then you get the evening news that is much more ADD-friendly.

http://i31.tinypic.com/35k1qpk.jpg

seriously lolling at CA car chases

Is this an appropriate thread to mention that our local Fox affiliate ran an editorial where they basically flat-up called the majority of internet criticism directed towards Obama (and, by not-so-subtle implication, many of the demonstrations and behavior at town halls etc) incredibly racist?

dylan ratigan is a little crazy. he seems to end every 'conversation' on his show by explaining how everyone actually agreed with the same points he makes in this huffpo rant

just had on a spokeswoman for ACORN and a conservative dude from some limited-government organization, and after they got done arguing.. totally went after limited-govt guy demanding to know why they weren't being activists for more competition in health insurance, and dude was obviously helpless without talking points about ACORN being corrupt and kind of sat there like UH

next, asked to comment on some lady's debtor's revolt video from youtubes, capeheart says: YOU GO GIRL, she's like sigourney weaver in alien all 'take that, bitch' (i am not kidding, the first words out of his mouth were srsly YOU GO, GIRL, then the producers helpfully played some footage from alien). now they have toure on to explain why VH1's divas show just doesn't have real divas anymore.

i find this show really charming because ratigan is kind of a know-it-all and takes himself a bit too seriously. so they put in all these segments on completely silly topics he obv either has no clue about or doesn't care -> lulz

xpost - it is! is it on the interwebs? i agree. and jimmy carter was right.

I just looked and can't find it; it was srsly the angriest op-ed piece I've ever seen from them! Dude was basically "you know, it's one thing to criticize the President's policies but what exactly does a picture of Obama photoshopped as a pimp have to do with healthcare?????" He also flat-out called most of the internet commentary "disgusting" and unfit for broadcast by ANY news station. It was great!

awesome. i'm gonna find that. it has to be out there somewhere unless the fox mothership had it disappeared.. (joking)

also, link to ratigan/huffpo that i forgot
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dylan-ratigan/americans-have-been-taken_b_285225.html

there's an entire sphere of the intertubes made up of finance bloggers going off about these issues, i hardly understand any of it, i feel like i should learn, but.. hey isn't that a car chase over there? there must be a car chase somewhere!

oh that beck guy is on the cover of time, notes everyone i know with horror
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1924348,00.html

speaking of whom, the first news i heard this morning was a report about ACORN, including a clip of beck ranting about ACORN, followed by information on how the right was attacking ACORN and how they'd lost funding and etc. ON NPR. i'm like damn, i can't even turn on the socialist marxist public radio waves to get away from beck ranting about ACORN?

sebelius says something about chuck todd sneezing the wrong way at a press briefing, and tells chuck that elmo (of sesame street) knows how to sneeze properly. how do i know this? jake the tapper blogged about it to make fun of him, and just now fox news played the clip of it AND found a clip of elmo sneezing on sesame street and played that too. later on, judge napolitano will explain you how sebelius' commentary on the press corps' sneezing habits and the use of public funds to explain proper sneezing on sesame street might be unconstitutional. then, beck will explain how sesame street is indoctrinating your children into the ways of socialist marxist alinskyist rabble rousing. then, there will be a car chase. there HAS to be a car chase.

i believe it is effectively impossible to win an argument with cavuto, if your point is that the government can and should do anything right. in fact, if you go on his show to explain why you believe the government can do something right, and should do that thing, he will argue with you and cut you off constantly. (if you are a conservative, he won't argue with you and will let you talk.)

if you counter with facts, he starts arguing by using cutesy metaphors (today's was about eating salad vs junk food) which can't be refuted with facts because, of course, they are not based in facts. if you insist on facts, he starts arguing that they don't matter because, well, you just can't trust the government to do anything right.

Some days "they" are the unconfirmed policy "czars" whom Beck fears Obama is using to subvert constitutional government — and he has some radical-sounding sound bites to back it up. Some days "they" are the network of leftist community organizers known as ACORN — and his indictment of the group is looking stronger every day.

On Sept. 14 the Senate overwhelmingly voted to cut off all federal funds to ACORN, and the U.S. Census Bureau severed its ties to the organization. This followed Beck's masterly promotion of a series of videos made by two guerrilla filmmakers who posed as a pimp and prostitute while visiting ACORN offices around the country.

srsly Time?

worst impressions in the world: glenn beck vs keith olbermann
i'm not really sure who takes it

http://i25.tinypic.com/ilygjc.jpg

i know he was just goofing around & all, but the shep was OTM that beck's show is great if you don't listen to it, just watch. i just can't take the horrible voices he does. sorry this is awful of me, but for real, he just played the clip of pelosi and made some andrew wk faces -> looooooool

http://i30.tinypic.com/219cj07.jpg

the reporting on ACORN has been terrible all round. a large nonprofit organization is organizationally dysfunctional and has some incompetent staff and management does f-all about the dysfunction -> dog bites man. maybe it did them a favor because they probably needed to change but nobody is going to force that to happen from inside the organization, because.. it's a large nonprofit and that's how they roll.

so sure, they probably aren't great at effectively using whatever small amount of tax money they get. but the level of outrage & media coverage devoted to this, however, versus.. i dunno.. blackwater? but beck wants to play it like this is part of an efficient and effective conspiracy that got obama elected and is secretly helping run the government. when in reality the whole freakin reason obama's campaign was so damned effective was that they used their own technology, their own volunteers, and their own infrastructure and DIDN'T rely these kinds of groups to register voters and for GOTV.

ratigan vs orly taitz
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/18/orly-taitz-rambles-is-yel_n_291333.html

(ratigan imho has trouble figuring out how to interview people who just ramble on with nutty political talking points.)

I have decided that Orly looks like Lady Gaga's imaginary dipso mother.

Did you guys watch this bit about Huckabee criticizing Obama for being on TV too much on MSNBC? These co-anchors or whatever they are, these two women who appear to be in different studios, I hate them, they're terrible. They spend too much time discussing something that's barely a news item, and they sort of team up on this woman from the Washington Times. The woman from WT made some okay points, although they're not exactly the points I would make if I were to say that Obama is on TV too much. She said that he might make a mistake due to the volume of interviews. I think it's more a case of it not being his job to be "celebrity-in-chief" and that he has better things to do. If the "liberal" news media wants to redirect the rhetoric on the health care debate, then let them do that. What makes them less credible than Fox News and conservative blogs for getting through to centrists?

Then there's this ACORN thing that happened in the house. I was watching C-SPAN for a while yesterday, and what I got from it was that it was an education funding bill, or a bill for helping out with student loans or something, and this democrat got up to respond to a republican's speech about ACORN and funding and why something-something should be recommitted or whatever (not clear on house procedure, obv.), and the democrat says, "This is fine because there's nothing in here about funding ACORN, so if you want to put something in that says not to, that's not a big deal. It's still a good bill." Did I understand wrong? Why are they making a big deal about it on Fox News? They're saying all these democrats voted against funding ACORN yesterday, and it'll look bad for the 70 who didn't.

I'm just informed well enough on this matter.

Oops. I meant, "I'm just NOT informed well enough on this matter."

nah, missed it! i agree that it's not really news & i think the fox-msnbc food fight is silly, obama was OTM when he said this stuff was like pro wrestling.. and i said before, my take on the pro wrestling was that if that's what's happening, rooting for the bad guys is so much more fun.

far as 'celebrity-in-chief,' well.. to my mind, he's popular, people listen to him, he is a good communicator, if there's an option to kick off the news cycle next week by saying what you want to say, go for it. especially since the dems are not at all on the same page. this is assuming he HAS something to say, but probably he'll waffle around about the public option again. (also, idk why he dissed fox news sunday, it seems unnecessary although maybe fox secretly thinks it's great, it certainly helps their marketing. i like chris wallace, i just wish he'd ask dick cheney tougher questions.)

If it's not on PBS, I can only tolerate Maddow, Olberman and Shepard Smith. I think everyone else, even the daytime anchors, make my skin crawl.

Do you ever watch The Washington Journal on CSPAN?

It gets pretty bad, but they've got some okay guys, but they have disconcerting poker faces - almost sarcastic straight faces - when they're listening to people. Furrowed brows and the like. But they don't correct outright untruths, misstatements, lies, whatever, and so it's ultimately an irritating show.

you know who i do like on the msnbc is geist, who is on morning joe, he def. has a good appreciation for the absurdity of the situation. ratigan is really interesting because he used to be on cnbc, they don't have to cover the random stupid story du jour, and now on a network where they do.. it's like he's trying to be serious journalist all the time, and assuming good faith (deserved or not) on the part of people he interviews, and it doesn't quite fit the circumstances. it seems like he's on some meta crusade to change the conversation, and it's not quite working but it's really interesting. to me, because if it were still my job to write research papers, i'd write some discourse analysis thing about it that nobody would read. to most viewers? probably not so interesting.

xpost - i don't watch pbs (i should, been too lazy to figure out when stuff is on that i want to watch, my tv is usually background noise), but otherwise the people i do set out to watch are maddow and shepard smith. olbermann.. he must have been a hell of a sportscaster, and he has his moments when covering serious issues, but he's so thin-skinned and mean-spirited when it comes to anyone who disagrees with him politically, and the potshots he takes are just embarrassing and hard to watch, in fact i can't watch them.

washington journal is kind of horrifying and amazing. i listen sometimes.. on sundays in DC, cspan radio replays all the sunday shows with no commercials, so i usually listen to that when it's not football season. in between they play excerpts of washington journal. they must have some rule that the anchors don't argue with callers. people say the craziest shit on that program! it's like i live in a bubble and suddenly there's this glimpse of political discourse in the real america, and it's like, zomg some people are goddamn crazy! even the ones who vote the way i do! i say this sort of affectionately though, people who are informed as can be about news and politics are crazy in different ways.

and then there's this!
http://i35.tinypic.com/a11gzn.jpg

i figure you must be into a near-tinfoil zone of some stripe to even call up a show like that. saw one with hitchens in like 05 and he went around for a while with a dude who insisted he had knowledge of 'backchannel negotiation' with syria. i really wonder why those shows exist, i doubt that kind of interactivity does a thing for ratings but what do i know.

what the fuck is that tree

THAT guy.

The thing with the WJ is that the producers and screeners have a crapload of lines lit up and they can choose who they want, but they won't hesitate to put that slow-brained crackpot on. Or if it's a black person, a democrat, they'll put a DUMB, badly spoken black person on.

The worst sin of WJ, though, is that the hosts won't correct the guests.

It's a diagram.

No, lots of intelligent people watch WJ, and lots of them call in. Every once in a while someone will get through and say, "Why don't you have people like us on more often?"

re: the tree! it seems a disservice to his audience to tell them that obama has close ties politically and financially here and that these people/organizations are central to his administration (valerie j is an exception in every sense and doesn't belong here, prob some others too whose names i don't recognize). i said it before, but what was a PROBLEM for lefty groups vis-a-vis obama for america, was that obama for america BUILT THEIR OWN infrastructure and fundraising and GOTV operations. they didn't NEED the unions and community groups and etc. that part of the traditional dem coalition lost influence when obama won the nomination. it would have been better for the left if obama DID need them, he'd have had to fight harder for employee free choice, for example.

fox's marketing department successfully trolls other news orgs, sanchez goes off. i'm like.. come on. fox imho gave a really disproportionate amount of coverage to the tea parties the first time around, to put it mildly. but that got a bunch of news orgs to cover the tea parties the second time around. so no doubt they are all patting themselves on the backs at fox, for the story they promoted becoming a bigger story. then they took out this ad, which is inaccurate, to which the proper response might be "lol, a news organization got the facts wrong in its own ad" and then drop it. but sanchez goes on and on & gives the tea party story more hype and then talks about o'reilly! you got trolled dude. idk, it's like watching a political campaign play bad defense.

oh oops that's at mediabistro - CNN's Sanchez: FNC "Using a Lie to Try and Divide People into Camps"

I hope the Jeff Jones on that tree is the Principal Ed Rooney one.

http://i37.tinypic.com/11m9tsz.jpg

what do we think of keith's new glasses? i think he looks weird.

I like that he looks weird in his new glasses.

rachel's show is SO NECESSARY. i've been watching a lot less of keith lately - he really needs new talking heads. i think chris hayes is pretty cute but he shouldn't be on every day.

another thing about keith: really wish he would stop making whatever sarah palin says his #1 story every night. whenever i talk to my grandmother/aunt about politics it's always "did you see what she said about this?" and i'm like, sarah palin is so remarkably unimportant to anything that is happening in real life, she has an effect on such a small and unimportant sector of the populace. and really it's what happens when you live in the liberal cable tv bubble. if they stopped talking about her, she would go away because there is much more important things to talk about. she's like the new jerry falwell or something. everything she says is awful and we know it so who cares.

i thought keith accidentally broke his glasses right before the show & had to scramble to find the ugly spare pair he keeps in a desk drawer somewhere, tbh. those are his for-real new glasses? i don't care for them.

oh you might be right daria. i just turned him on last night and saw him wearing them so i assumed that they were his new ones.

rachel's show is one of my favorites. i actually didn't watch for quite a long time b/c too much cutesy stuff but it's changed a lot for the better.

http://i35.tinypic.com/34epx4y.jpg

i have no reason to believe they aren't actually his new glasses, that was just my roundabout way of saying i don't like them

I've seen him wear them for a few days, so I think they're at least semi-permanent. Didn't check today. I can't watch a full show of any news program. I do a lot of flipping and sampling.

beck and his chalkboards.....

his constant fixation on venezuela is so ridiculous & baffling - right now he's running a video of hugo chavez talking about indoctrinating schools. wonder if beck was out defending parents who didn't want evolution teachings banned from their kids schools.

http://i35.tinypic.com/imo3lk.jpg

newsflash! people at liberal organizations know each other! there might be.. CONNECTIONS..! DEVELOPING...

it's like a vast left w-- ah you heard it

http://i35.tinypic.com/rw6j3n.jpg

ok, someone caption this

Pat Bucuanan was just on hardball calling out Obama for not being a "big enough man" to withdraw from Afghanistan if he thinks the war is unwinnable. (a la Reagan & Beirut)

an unbelievably excellent news blooper ALMOST happened yesterday on studio b, but did not, introducing some dude who worked on "transse... uhhhh... TRANSNATIONAL terrorism". sooooo disappointed

i just saw that beck thing. crazy.

i like the way even john bolton was embarrassed by his leaps of logic.

well, this is weird
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jbzG_BlkG2Hfc818EPRRn1bBlP6gD9AT9L3O0

WASHINGTON — The FBI is investigating whether anti-government sentiment led to the hanging death of a U.S. Census worker near a Kentucky cemetery. A law enforcement official told The Associated Press the word 'fed" was scrawled on the dead man's chest.

Sen. Sherrod Brown is actually Columbo, I think. that voice!

forgot that michelle malkin existed, but here she is on sean hannity intimating that she understands more about the middle east & the ideas & thoughts of middle east citizens than barack obama

yall think keith is gonna draw a connection between beck and this lynched federal worker tomorrow night?

maddow's guest right now is TRACY MCGRADY

um okay what the living fuck

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9nVpO1Dvfk&feature=player_embedded

oh he didn't really. i was watching that today & when i caught myself recoiling from the screen in horror (this happens often when i watch his show TBH, usually it's because of the voices) i realized.. duh, he knows everyone is going to be reacting like that, clearly he's not going to do it. it's not quite frog baseball but..

I talked about B&B frog baseball last night.

and i actually listened to the entire couric interview with beck. i'm convinced his politics are not internally consistent or coherent & mostly based on impulse and snap judgements, and he just has a real talent for pushing people's buttons. i wonder if the answer isn't to just shrug & figure that he's really punking his OWN AUDIENCE most of all. that, and watch with the sound off for the lulz.

xpost - haha really? in reference to beck?

In reference to nothing. Just me and Roxy shooting the shit.

<3 Qaddafi, by the way.

ann lookin kinda rough lately
http://i36.tinypic.com/313ngcn.jpg

this is old, but.. one of those great "just asking!" moments
http://i35.tinypic.com/veyqkp.jpg

fox business is pretty terrible from what little i have seen. also, nobody watches it. planning to watch more to see if anything weird happens.

idk when this was on, from some blog. serious business advice for you from the fox business:
http://i35.tinypic.com/sx2d7c.jpg

That fits with the whole Fox News vibe, considering that Glen Beck did a comedy tour earlier this year.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/27568.html

“It feels like WWF wrestling,” Obama explained to NBC’s Brian Williams in an interview. “You know, everybody’s got their role to play.” [..] Obama isn’t just donning his Columbia Journalism Review hat to diagnose what ails the wheezing industry. He’s attempting to isolate one particular media irritant — cable news.

This president, it seems, has an obsession with it.

The big three cable networks — Fox, MSNBC and CNN — have become a collective punching bag for Obama, usually referred to generically and always with derision. [.....]

Administration aides say Obama does occasionally get glimpses of cable news from the many White House TVs that are always on and tuned in or when he’s flying on Air Force One. But usually, aides say, the president is told by staff what controversy, speculation or outrage is being chewed upon that day on cable.

Obama’s private response matches his public disdain.

“It’s a lot of eye-rolling,” said one West Wing aide when asked how the president usually responds to the hot topic du jour.

President Obama, clearly the answer is to get cable news updates on ILX. i bet he misses out on all the car chases.

lol jonathan martin

"This president, it seems, has an obsession with it."

i bet he has a good sense of the absurd, maybe he'll come around to just appreciating the weirdness on cable news & not being bothered about the same people yelling the same talking points. what is funny is the CNN responded on page 2 of that article & said no doubt Obama was talking about Fox/MSNBC - yeah, right! all day every day, CNN brings on the same group of partisans to argue over every single issue.

now this is news
http://i37.tinypic.com/fjjpfa.jpg

OHNO, the GOVERNMENT is spending YOUR TAX DOLLARS on this!

http://i35.tinypic.com/9itxz7.jpg
http://i35.tinypic.com/nyhit4.jpg

(note: these are in reference to NIH studies that, when sensationalized and taken out of context, because they study something that might look scandalous on tv, get put on tv to remind the fox watching audience that the government just might not be able to do anything right with YOUR tax dollars. screw you, taxpayer!)

http://i28.tinypic.com/2nas3k9.jpg

this nice young man is going to be on the fox news sunday.
shep asked the question, but wallace could not confirm or deny whether he'll bring the fur coat. we learned that it is chinchilla.

http://i33.tinypic.com/sw7h8w.jpg

is that martha? did she go to SC? i like her

holy shit daria, lolololololol

that is martha, she didn't go there, someone on her staff did though! shep was mocked on the air by several people this afternoon about that horrible ole miss game. particularly chris wallace. in retaliation was like ok, let's try this, at south carolina's stadium they yell GAME!!!!, then you yell... and wallace is like uh no

kanye/orly is from ohnotheydidnt politics, god bless them. also this:
http://i35.tinypic.com/syqf69.jpg

Orly Taitz looks like Lady Gaga at 50. That is all.

Lady Gaga could do worse.

http://i37.tinypic.com/2v8ifd5.jpg

LEAVE COURTNEY ALONE

haha omg

before that, the live desk had yet another fearmongering report on health care in other countries specifically canada, saying look, here are some canadian people who had to wait MONTHS for these tests, some say this is what happens when you have government run health care, and.. it's like GOOD GRIEF. FOX. OBAMA IS NOT PROPOSING A CANADIAN STYLE SYSTEM. (much to my dismay.) so why does your reporting imply that he is? way to mislead your audience.

i just want LOVE MATCH to happen as much as CAR CHASE, is all

i was going to say, it's a wonder court hasn't been in a car chase yet, but i suppose it's unlikely to ever happen.. being a total stan i happen to know that she doesn't drive

glenn beck town hall atm!!

ooooh a black woman

this woman just rose her hand and said "the only person who i feel is representing me in congress is ron paul" and there was lots of applause

LOL the small issue of a driving license would stop Courtney getting involved in CAR CHASE? She never used to believe in the concept of 'backstage pass' but didn't let that technicality stop her from going there.

"i didn't want my children indoctrinated so i decided to home school them. but i was still told what curriculum i had to teach them, this pro-homosexual agenda. i still had to get them vaccinated."

"i was a closeted tea partier."

YMMV on the whole homeschooling issue but do parents have to prove anything about their OWN education before they're allowed to indoctrinate their kids? My feeling is that none of the churchy parents I see advocating same could pass a GED, even.

j0rdan those aren't actual quotes are they? i was not listening too closely.

gaaah now baier's show is rerunning report that is like FEAR CANADIAN HEALTH CARE as an FYI to people who want us to have a canada style government-run health care system DESPITE THE FACT THAT THE DEMOCRATS ARE NOT TRYING TO DO THIS

some might say fox is running this story to make people afraid of what the democrats are doing with health care reform. some might say that. it might just fit right in with the message of those scary scary political ads saying that obama's trying to set up all government run health care & how terrible that would be.

yeah those are real

the quotes

chief blame-canada correspondent appears live on fox report to rehash the same points about how canadians are coming to the us for treatment because of the long wait times, so their system is great as long as you don't get sick. shep points out that what's being worked on in congress is not canadian government run health care. dude is like uh.. well.. some say it might LEAD to government run health care.. & shep tried to explain to him that the public option was not the same thing. YAY. and god, so bummed about the misinfo in the first place, i would love some canadian style government health care.

"but i was still told what curriculum i had to teach them, this pro-homosexual agenda."
WTH?! beck smiled and nodded, didn't he. how do people even believe things like this?

ratigan had glenn greenwald <3 on today! i never see greenwald on tv. talking about iran. arianna huffington was on at the same time & greenwald was arguing iran had in fact provided the proper notifications for whatever nuclear thing they were building & said a bunch of critical stuff about israel. i was like O_O you can say that on television? huffington sounded like a neocon by comparison. wonder if they'll have him back.

then there was some weird segment theoretically about conspiracy theories against ACORN, which somehow became about ratigan haranguing a dude from redstate.com over why investigating ACORN was a priority and wasn't it a bigger priority to prosecute/investigate the banks and the health insurance industry and maybe halliburton.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-tv/arianna-takes-on-conserva_b_302977.html

ratigan talks to michael moore (and of course, another 'generational theft' reference). good stuff - talking about the anger out there & then what happens if it doesn't get directed into changing things through the democratic system.

seriously, this is good tv. ratigan is starting a radio show once a week, wonder if he is like.. uh ok nobody watches msnbc daytime, time to start looking for other options.

http://i33.tinypic.com/14e1jfc.jpg

also, beck miseducated some people again today

http://i37.tinypic.com/alkifm.jpg

also, won't somebody please think of the children

http://i33.tinypic.com/2nkqp1g.jpg

and cavuto was like damn, after all we've done to scare the public, it still hasn't been killed? (plays b roll of zombie movie)

i should start an actual blog

ratigan's show constantly has these trainwreck segments with Serious People from major publications and dc think tanks where he gets totally annoyed and starts scolding them like 'these are BS talking points you are not being serious or constructive!' and he is right!

however, the problem is, once you knock people off their talking points, your viewers discover that many of your guests don't really know much of anything about the issues they're talking about! and there are unwritten rules that say, you can't reveal on cable news that most of the talking heads don't know anything about anything.

trying to get any of three pundits to stop laughing and say anything serious about palin's recent speech is not easy:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/32983650#32983650

i would read this blog

on the one hand i'd feel sort of presumptuous or pretentious or something, actually blogging about this, on the other hand i kind of like the idea of a rich fourfour style blog except about cable news instead of top model..

and then there's this!
http://i38.tinypic.com/ri6aag.jpg

daria if you had a blog with nothing but nutty ass screen caps of glen beck you would be a star within 30 days

glenN

yeah i wouldn't like that though. :) really once you get past the goofy conspiracy diagrams and sight gags.. idk, the thing that does bother me about beck is the witch hunts going after lower-level administration officials and organizations that aren't part of some big powerful conspiracy, they are just liberal organizations

beck just brought up the beating death of that young man in chicago and makes a ridiculous argument about how railroad ties should be registered and regulated, obviously, in order to get to how guns don't kill people, and how wrong it is that chicago and dc try to ban handguns. i know, standard talk radio crap.

here this is old and i can't explain it. i never post about cooper because i hardly ever watch.

http://i36.tinypic.com/2irrqdc.jpg

good stuff on the CNN

http://i33.tinypic.com/2dguhdv.jpg

this rep. just walked onto the set of the situation room & was asked repeatedly to apologize for this thing. he said the republicans have no plan (they don't) and "I'm not apologizing to the Republicans, the Republicans should apologize to America!"

hahahah loooooooooooool get 'em dude

more questions: how are you not like joe wilson?

"because I didn't insult the president in front of 40 million people?"

yeah A++++++ to this guy

Credit due: well played, Alan Grayson, FL-08.

here's a caption for you! heh. this is gold.

http://i33.tinypic.com/awrqe0.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cexmPkkDKdg

fox running a TRUTH ABOUT ACORN special on friday. i think i gotta be somewhere, maybe i should record it. i can just tape over my copy of fox's TRUTH ABOUT HALLIBURTON program that investigated where all those billions went, because that was some real money. it's a good thing they covered it.

coming up.. cavuto interviews dan rather about cbs lawsuit and stuff. why rather goes on cavuto's show of all shows, i couldn't say. i'm a big fan of dan rather though. when i was a kid we always watched cbs evening news. love that guy. <3

rather sez.. core issue in this lawsuit is about not letting large corporations manipulate the news. and i guess it's going to another court of appeals & is not over. rather also says what he found out was that viacom and cbs buried this important story (bush national guard memos) in order to protect people in washington who regulate them. cavuto's like.. but they ran the story.. and rather replies that unlike all these other stories they didn't stand behind their reporters after it ran. up next, rather talking about obama white house vs fox news.

i swear, shep keeps forgetting what day it is at the end of the evening newscast XD
i usually don't know what day it is, but if october 1st were MONDAY, there would be FOOTBALL. this is not hard to remember.

gradynotgrady "unfortunatley, Kanye did not jump on stage and say that Chicago had the best bid of all time" <-- David Schuster just said this on air.
3 minutes ago from Echofon

ok a few minutes ago beck played some clip of some cartoon video that oreilly's people found and alleged that it was teaching about crossdressing in our schools. really. i'm sure that's really happening. i'm sorry, stuff like this just makes me think that beck and oreilly are horrible human beings.

now beck is like there were so many MOMS at my book signing, MOMS love our show, we have MOMS on the show today to talk about these real conservative american principles and values

i mean, clearly what this country needs is some suburban mom in a sweater set to declare we need to head down the road to wingnuttery because she knows things AS A MOM

AS A FEMINIST
//starts laughing
///throws up

i was taught about crossdressing in school

but that was last year, and i'm in medical school, so

look who's suddenly become a *liberal* blogger

http://i37.tinypic.com/2eyarv6.jpg

wtf, no he's not. i mean, there are things that are true and things that are not true, and sullivan being a liberal blogger is. not. true.

(PALIN) REMAINS THE HOOD INTERNET

news you can use @ fox report: iphone apps that alert you to speed traps and red light cameras. sweet

i have to say, as far as driving goes i am totally on board with the crazy libertarians like 'i should be able to drive as fast as i want whenever i want, screw you.' this is not really a workable plan for society but i figure.. approx 75% of people on the road at any given time are terrible drivers anyway and liable to do something stupid, no matter how many laws and speed traps and red light cameras you put in their way.

http://i36.tinypic.com/xf0pp4.jpg

serious business.

source: tailgater monthly

shep!!

more bear news
http://i35.tinypic.com/518sgk.jpg

they flew these people in from DENVER to be interviewed in the studio about this thing

i mean, the show started with a report about iran and nuclear weapons, and they spent time covering afghanistan, health care, etc., but really, you need to know about this lady. i don't even know if the world is real any more.

ratigan is getting loopier by the day, these conservative people are all mad b/c of stuff he said this morning Conservatives Don't Care If ‘Half the Country Dies’ in Order to ‘Take Down Obama’

has some new talking point about 'corporate communism' which is.. ok are you auditioning for talk radio?

holy shit, wednesday night olbermann is doing a SPECIAL COMMENT HOUR about health care - i am going to love it a lot i think. keith was one of the first big tv heads to really call out fake "blue dogs"

hey, richard wolfe is back on keith, still noted as an "msnbc political analyst" also as a "senior strategist" at that firm which no one knows what it means

damn i just read this glenn greenwald blog post about richard wolffe from feb 07 - what a true vile piece of shit http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/02/21/wolffe/index.html

speaking of, i tweeted last night about how much of an unnecessarily pompous asshole david gregory is esp considering how worthless he (and others like him) are to the american public, and lo and behold http://bit.ly/17CWx5

(another greenwald post fyi)

ratigan is getting loopier by the day, these conservative people are all mad b/c of stuff he said this morning Conservatives Don't Care If ‘Half the Country Dies’ in Order to ‘Take Down Obama’

has some new talking point about 'corporate communism' which is.. ok are you auditioning for talk radio?

― daria, actually (daria-g), Monday, October 5, 2009 9:38 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

yeah dude needs to dial it back a bit

not today! it was O_O betsy mccaughey vs ratigan vs rep. weiner

it went completely off the rails into ratigan badgering her over and over that she's not answering the question & mccaughey calling him unfair

then at the end of the show he said something about, here are these facts mccaughey disputed, we double checked them, you can look them up at the weekly standard, and distorting the facts in service to an agenda that's hurting the country is borderline treasonous in my opinion

looooool

hahaha

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1009/MSNBCs_Ratigan_battles_McCaughey.html

I'm told it got even more bitter after the cameras turned off.

"You are a disgrace to journalism," McCaughey told Ratigan, according to a source on the set.

"You were a great guest, except that we usually want answers to our questions," he responded.

daaamn i heard that mccaughey v weiner happened but i didn't know it happened THERE, wow

oh wait

Anthony Weiner and Betsy McCaughey brought their act to MSNBC this morning, where Weiner -- unlike last night -- was a relatively mellow presence while host Dylan Ratigan tangled bitterly with McCaughey.

what is weiner doing this shit for?? so bizarre

shep trying to explain to sen barrasso (wyoming) that it's not fair to claim the public option is a government takeover of health care & brings up all the $$$$$$$$$$$$ from insurance industry lobbyists to congress, asking why can't we get a public option even though 60% of americans are for it? you're either for the insurance industry or you're for the public option!

this is fantastic. <3 "how do we keep the costs down without a public option?" jeez he's really after this guy and not getting an answer. now he's after the democratic analyst for the same thing.

<3<3<3

why would rep weiner be intere$ted in debate$ with mccaughey? i have an idea a$ to why he'$ $o intere$ted

hannity special guest tonight: MICHAEL MOORE
should be good tv, right?

xp g$$d p$int

end of studio b is a little report on that krispy kreme bacon cheeseburger they're selling at some state fair

the shepard is like [deadpan].. so, there are a lot of ways to end it all. you could take a bottle of pills. you could get in a car chase and have the police come and shoot you. or.. you could eat one of those things. the apocalypse is at hand.

<3<3<3 seriously dude, don't ever change.

man im gonna watch hannity so hard tonight

ewwwww

a-ha - i was listening to tv all afternoon when this was on, the reporter was on at least two other news programs with this hit piece on canadian health care. i seriously do wonder why anchors on the other shows didn't bother to say anything about it, or if they waited to do it until the reporter was live on the air, or what.
Fox News anchor questions channel’s own story about Canadian health care

(1:50 caption POLLS: MOST CANADIANS PREFER THEIR GOVT-RUN SYSTEM)

i wonder if hannity is all jealous of beck. i mean hannity's ratings aren't up all that much (not like he's in trouble because he wins by alot over cnn/msnbc) but the audience wanting to hear a party line republican.. not growing, it seems

thank you talking points memo -> Smith: Every Vote Against The Public Option Is A Vote For The Insurance Companies

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1009/27982.html
An FNC spokesperson tells POLITICO that Ailes and Axelrod had a “cordial conversation” over coffee while the president was in town.

about what? it doesn't say. lame. politico & fnc know something you don't know.

http://i36.tinypic.com/2cih204.jpg

hannity is one of those rightwing radio guys that is all about the $$$$$$ and doesn't really believe half the stuff he says, isn't he?

this isn't very interesting

ass transit locations with homemade bombs...

i missed that part of the discussion i guess

quelle dommage!

alors, QUEL dommage. i don't remember anything anymore, thanks to cable news. and here i always thought it'd be MTV that'd destroy my brain.

woah, the shep vs barrasso is this giant blaring headline on huffpo right now (slow news day?)

it's gotta be real weird to work in tv now, where so much interwebs "news" content is selected/edited content from tv broadcasts earlier in the day & you can't control what they'll edit.

today the shep asked re: afghanistan:
can you even imagine a way of screwing something up more thoroughly than we have over the last eight years?
nope

glenn beck just dropped a reference to cecil b demille! as in even jesus or cecil b demille couldn't have shown (whatever he was complaining about) any better

seriously this show is so camp

yo j0rdan watching special comment hour? i tried to watch some of it but keith when he gets like this is just hard for me to deal with. on aesthetic grounds. but aesthetics matter a lot, in fact!

yeah i've been flipping back and forth b/w that and the baseball game. i'm usually a big fan of special comments but i'm not exactly sure what he's adding to the discourse here. i mean, he already did one special comment on health care, calling out the congressmen on both sides that are owned by the insurance companies & other medical interests, and i thought it was really great. but going over the painful details of his father's death, idk... i think it's noble but rather worthless and his show is too visible to have an hour wasted like this for no real reason

If they'd zoom out a little from Keith's face his ratings would immediately double

http://blogs.salon.com/0002090/images/olbermann.jpg

these new glasses are so dan deacon

Zoom out, replace Scherzo theme song with a Umphrey's McGee hit - record rating

http://i37.tinypic.com/33eifcg.jpg

<3

i don't trust a special comment because they are never funny. not that it should be all comedy but idk how someone can maintain that tone for that long & not dial it down, i mean it sounds like the kind of speech someone delivers quite in earnest in a russian novel but that person is, as everyone knows, crazy and/or drunk

haha yes i mean the tone is of course insanely ridiculous (i mean, keith has to know this is true. at this point he has to be sort of playing along right) but i often find them to be 100% otm if not actually informative

actually in a russian novel, by happenstance, keith, keith's extremely ill father, o'reilly, sarah palin, and the cast of morning joe are gathered in the same room as this special comment is delivered, and geist is one the sane and normal person watching it all, and for propriety's sake none of them can walk out and then finally after the most intensely serious part of the comment, someone (who is drunk) has an outburst and everyone is utterly mortified and embarrassed and keith storms out the door and randomly, from seven floors up, a piano falls out the window and on his head

lol that sounds all too perfect

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/07/shep-smith-outraged-by-ba_n_313304.html

omg huffpo found the clip of the krispy kreme cheeseburger

what concerns me greatly is, based on comments so far, huffpo readers are not half as smart as they think they are because they don't seem to notice this is funny?

keith's glasses are back to normal, maybe they were just a temporary pair?

maddow reporting on push-poll type of questions (some say, she says) used by the fox news in a recent poll of theirs, in which it was found that a majority of respondents don't support health care reform. then has trippi on, who argues he takes the results as fact & doesn't read the poll the same way & thinks the polling outfit doesn't cook the books, so to speak. AWESOME. i loooooooooooove rachel maddow. because she was really level-headed about her critique of the fox news & had on trippi who is a diehard progressive & he actually disagrees and says the poll is fair and the message to progressives is, fight harder.

this is great stuff. maddow also said she thinks fox is a "diverse organization" as opposed to.. whatever trippi might expect that she thought of them. so interesting. <3

so this kevin jennings thing is going to be a thing huh?

oh no. ugh. i haven't followed too closely and i'd have hoped that it would just go away because he's done nothing to deserve this. it's so transparently flat out homophobia. i don't even know. i don't know how some people sleep at night.

hannity just beat stephanopolous over the head with jennings' association w/ harry hay (who in turn was "associated" w/ NAMBLA etc etc). i'm afraid george did a lot of hemming and hawing.

lots of tenuous bullshit at this point, but y'know

i don't even know. well, i do know. that's the game, the dc politics and media game where you go ahead and spin whichever way benefits your side, whenever and wherever you can, whether or not it's honest or not, whether or not it potentially destroys someone's career and reputation, and if it does, you get a nice feather in your cap for it. i can't take it tbh. both sides do it. the right is a lot worse. and the left, if you think they don't, they'll let you down.

hannity can be a real affable guy but where do you draw the line as far as being willing to smear someone to benefit the republicans? trying to destroy someone's reputation and career by ginning up a phony association with nambla, someone should draw the line. and if hannity won't, which evidently he won't, the network should fucking step in and tell him to draw it.

http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/10/08/what-even-the-white-house-likes-about-fox-news/

even the white house likes (fox wh correspondent) major garret.

i watched about 8 sec of hannity this weet and heard there is a "controversy" brewing about obama's "safe schools czar" and i didn't have the heart to listen to what the problem was. so we have a pedo in the white house now? that's the next thing, post-acorn?

this week

a GAY pedo, which i'm sure is the real cause for all the FOXY outrage. from what i gather, while jennings was teaching he advised a minor (16 year old) about a relationship with an older man, basically just sayin "hey, you wore a condom, right?"

and then praising Harry Hay publicly.

that's the next thing, post-acorn?

^^that's exactly how they painted it. it's just one more stop along the way to America = post-apocalyptic hell for straight, white Christians.

which is, i guess, how they paint everything post-W

http://i33.tinypic.com/25i9r9e.jpg

what is this fool thinking, shep is not even in today due to upcoming & very important miss/alabama game

wait, that's not CA, aren't all car chases in the LA area???

well, sometimes texas steps up

jeez why didn't pavement ever write a song about car chases? they should have.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/business/media/12fox.html

Attacking the news media is a time-honored White House tactic but to an unusual degree, the Obama administration has narrowed its sights to one specific organization, the Fox News Channel, calling it, in essence, part of the political opposition. “We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” said Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, in a telephone interview on Sunday. “As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

i'm not really sure what the WH is doing here. i mean story selection & framing leans right on a lot of stories during the day time. but do you want to go to war with them? dems like gov rendell are on fox all the time & they were a lot more fair abt covering hillary's campaign than msnbc was. (& even the opinion shows don't seem to attack her now.) idk. the more i watch, the more i'm convinced what makes fox news fox news isn't the frequent airing of gop talking points. it's style and attitude. so imho if you really need to go after fox, you should trash talk like they are a division rival but have a sense of humor about it. don't go on the cnn & get all pissy because that sounds like you are whining about the refs.

the only person on fox who that WH tactic will make mad is shep, and hes the only person on the network whos nice to them

a lot of their correspondents are decent. there are also a lot of people who watch fox. and they vote.
it's not how i'd handle it. i'd treat them like any other news outlet, and push back when there's an issue of bad journalism. because then you've got them dead to rights imho. it's tricky since beck/hannity/oreilly/etc are "opinion" programming so they are allowed to get stuff wrong. but if they're obviously, blatantly wrong on the face of it, you can get them on that. but once you declare fox is not a legitimate news organization, all bets are off.

the other thing is, maybe it is politically helpful in the short-term for dems to portray the entire gop as being run by far right wackos like palin, beck etc., but idk if this is good for the country..

we talked about this today in my 'politics in the media' class IN COLLEGE and basically my opinion is that the administration has decided that fox news is more powerful than the republican party and thus what they are really doing is combatting the party structure like they would the RNC if it wasn't headed by a bunch of pointless imbeciles like eric cantor & michael steele. i mean, we've certainly never seen a "news organization" facilitate and promote something to the effect of the tea parties, the town hall 'uprisings' and then the glenn beck 9/12 march on washington. these aren't things that a "news organization" does, it's something that a legit political institution does, and in that sense i think it's right for them to combat fox in that manner. why debate boehner and bachmann and pawlenty and cantor and steele directly when you can just go to the source directly, or at least the most important one. they're cutting out the middle man in a sense i think.

maybe (or rather, probably) it's just dumb red meat partisanship to 'take on' fox. the only strategy i could guess at is the WH considers it a kind of quarantine move -- keep the GOP as wedded as closely as possible to the fox style and substance, which looks great on ratings compared to any single other media outlet but looks really wretched and small compared to all the rest of them.

the other possibility is that the ppl that work in the WH really are gravely, personally offended with the garbage that fox throws at them. that's a scarier theory than either of the other two.

i don't see why they shouldn't be confronting fox. it's not a normal news outlet, not when it's promoting & facilitating the things that it has since health care really took center stage. now they may be doing for profit & ratings and not ideology but i don't think the administration can risk the whole administration basically (health care) by going "oh well we lose to THE NEWS! WHOOPS!" because no one has ever 'taken on' a news organization. that's not what fox is. at least not the beck & hannity movement.

and if that means that chris wallace gets butthurt & the administration looks petty than so be it but i don't think they should just sit back and let an organized political movement that is spearheaded at least publicly by employees of a 'news organization' totally demolish their big ticket bill because of 'decorum' or how the executive branch & news has interacted before. it's just not the same, at least not for now.

cavuto went on a bit of a rant about the WH comm director eg "let's pretend you take the issue seriously, let's pretend this, let's pretend that you work for the POTUS and not a leftwing blog" & called her overwrought and snippy, among other things. meanwhile, shep has not mentioned this story. good grief. beck today is constantly like "oh hai anita u mad?"

the thing abt the tea parties is, everybody knows fox coverage of the tea parties was hyping them and not just covering them. none of their actual journalists are going to call out high-level decision-making that allowed that to happen, but i wonder if they are uncomfortable with it.

in general my take is that fox has a very strong point of view but it is *not* a point of view that is strictly in support of the gop/opposed to national democrats. idk why so many dem communications people & fox critics don't get it & don't have a sense of humor about it.

fwiw, nobody's managed to demolish the health care bill yet. i am a total outsider, so what do i know, but it seems to me that the biggest obstacles standing in the way of real health care reform are max baucus, blanche lincoln, kent conrad, blue dogs in the house, and all the money and lobbying from the insurance industry that affects these people, not the tea parties. now it might give some cover to baucus et al to pretend that the obstacle to reform is fox news and the tea parties, but is it?

we've certainly never seen a "news organization" facilitate and promote something to the effect of the tea parties, the town hall 'uprisings' and then the glenn beck 9/12 march on washington. these aren't things that a "news organization" does, it's something that a legit political institution does

this is such a key point and I wish Dunn had included it in her original announcement. if you're going to draw a line and formally recognize a war with an enemy, the degree to which your enemy has already been provoking you needs to be stated so it doesn't seem like you've got hurt feelings over critical headlines

but I don't have too much of a problem with the formality of this, it's absolutely true that when your main ratings draw is a man who is insinuating that the government is actively courting the assassination of their sitting president so as to provide an excuse for the total martial takeover of the states by a 'civilian' black army, and this man is organizing rallies that are increasingly detaching themselves from the republican party line, then yes that's a political enemy

it seems to me that the biggest obstacles standing in the way of real health care reform are max baucus, blanche lincoln, kent conrad, blue dogs in the house, and all the money and lobbying from the insurance industry that affects these people, not the tea parties. now it might give some cover to baucus et al to pretend that the obstacle to reform is fox news and the tea parties, but is it?

yes! baucus and the blue dogs cant pretend to be "moderate" without a vocal extremist fringe--and without fox the extremist fringe is a lot less vocal!

fwiw, nobody's managed to demolish the health care bill yet. i am a total outsider, so what do i know, but it seems to me that the biggest obstacles standing in the way of real health care reform are max baucus, blanche lincoln, kent conrad, blue dogs in the house, and all the money and lobbying from the insurance industry that affects these people, not the tea parties. now it might give some cover to baucus et al to pretend that the obstacle to reform is fox news and the tea parties, but is it?

― daria, actually (daria-g), Monday, October 12, 2009 4:28 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

well, in this regard i totally 100% agree with you. but my much larger point is that fox has two of the people that functionally head the amorphous blob that is the opposition to the administration and since they have & wield the power that comes with that then they should be dealt with as so. fox doesn't refer to beck & hannity as newsmen and they shouldn't but they also aren't "editorial columnists" as the fox vp (i believe) tried to pass them off as. if they aren't killing the health care bill (which i agree the much larger problem is faux-blue dogs) they are certainly dominating the news cycle while masquerading as part of the media, and every administration in the history of the country has painstakingly tried to control the news cycle and the flow of media and all that. in many respects i think this is a new frontier, just a bunch of different things - power of cable news, black dem president, weak GOP - fusing together to create a new force, at least for these past few months. they're treading in water that no one else really has because no one else has really had to.

so just out of curiosity, when did "the media" and "the news" become synonymous?

crafty - fox's news report on this mentions the day obama went on 5 sunday shows, but not fox's. they say, on that day wallace instead interviewed 3 CEOs on job creation in the struggling economy. they don't say that the main interview that day was the head of ACORN, an organization that has been the subject of ridiculously disproportionate and frequently inaccurate coverage by fox.

http://brotherpeacemaker.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/the-racism-of-fox-news.jpg

"news organization"

1. Fox News is despicable.
2. The White House calling out Fox for being awful, no matter how accurate, is probably a bad move politically.
------

       O_o
3. \_(.)(o)_/

My mom has watched almost nothing but Fox since I got home, combined with yelling at me in talking point style. I leave on Thursday and just before I go, I'm going to surreptitiously CHILD LOCK Fox on both televisions. I don't know why I never thought of it before!

lol thank god my parents hate everyone, just like me.

michael steele: i'm very disappointed in this bill. the democrats refuse to go where the american people want them to go!
shep: to a public option?

lol

round of grimfaced statesmanlike applause to max baucus btw

no doubt. still lets the guy go on too long unchallenged.. it was a friendly interview but some good questions there.. let's see what he says to bill nelson.

xpost

bill nelson interview strategy.. speak so sloooooooooowly and say nothing much..
hahahah nelson: "that argument for the public option is the best one i've heard"
shep: "i took it from your webpage"

i mean honestly, why can't we get a public option when it'd be for the public good and the majority of the public wants it? the trouble with all these interviews is, if you are trying to get someone to tell you that government is working for big moneyed interests instead of for the american public, they are not going to admit that.

shep congratulates nelson on his miami dolphins winning that game with the WILDCAT!!! XD

actually, bill nelson may have admitted that when they get the bill to the floor, they are going to put the public option back in there. not entirely sure, because conservatives complaining about the interview =/ reliable source of information.

http://i38.tinypic.com/2wemixv.jpg

ayo what?

i mean, germ plasms! YOU ARE NOT ALONE darby crash!

Wait, is Glenn Beck in favor of what Walter Lippmann is saying, in general ignorance of various other things Walter Lippmann said, or is he being like "look at the eugenics the germ-plasm loving liberal science community wants to force on America" or is he just like "Hey, you know what would be fun, is reading what dead white guys thought about biology", and he's following it up with a selection from Teddy Roosevelt's theories on the superiority of the white race? Because I cannot parse what use Glenn Beck has for Walter Lippmann quotes, at all.

it was probably part of his ongoing series giving an alternative history of the progressive movement, the goal of which is apparently to prove that it was progressives who were responsible for fascism, racism, the great depression, you name it.

is ratigan trying to get fired? took a couple days off, i guess & is back & even more obnoxious than he was before.

just had the ceo of the chamber of commerce on the show to talk about.. something & kept badgering the guy with ridiculously convoluted questions asking if he's really lobbying for job creation or just more loopholes to allow (blablabla broken financial systems) banks to keep stealing all our money. threw in some reference to how something might be treasonous & the dude got more and more annoyed and said he could hardly get four to six words out between questions & ratigan is like that's because you're talking nonsense. i mean the guy is a right wing shill, but it's hard to pin down precisely what's wrong with what he's saying because O_O

http://i34.tinypic.com/2nbekbd.jpg

touré just went on and said he was thrilled rush limbaugh's bid to buy the st louis rams is likely to be turned down by NFL & was like, i know limbaugh would really love to own a plantation of black men working for him but SORRY HAHAHA

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-14/how-fox-news-outsmarted-the-white-house/

Ailes knows how to make the confusion of the news into a nervous and strangely comforting comic opera. Most of the Fox News day’s production is a reading of helter-skelter bulletins into a coherent narrative consistent with themes of super-patriotism, progress, profit, and paranoia. In the evening, Fox News becomes a variety show of cattiness, gossip, chants, and whoppers. Recently Fox News has added the theme of “Survivalism for Dummies,” though this subplot could soon slip into an extended version of the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.”

for real. ailes used to do theater production, in fact. if the white house really wanted to marginalize them, should they just shrug & say.. well, that's nice fox, but.. we don't really have time to watch your shows. SMH.

http://i34.tinypic.com/r7k4k0.jpg

i mean, i wonder if beck is sitting here thinking, i can't believe she is taking this shit seriously. you know? do palin and bachmann realize how camp they are? i suppose if they did, it wouldn't work

case in point
http://i37.tinypic.com/29pz1qu.jpg

to criticize obama about attending latin culture celebration, plays clip of hbo movie in which john adams is all disgusted by the decadent french aristocracy and, therefore, says something so intense that it immediately makes him ten times more ridiculous than anyone else in the scene, despite the fact that the others are all in powdered wigs and heavy makeup. and beck wants to know who's going to be like john adams. in other words, who's going to step into the ridiculousness of modern politics and look like the biggest fool in the room? either this is some next-level comic opera, or ten years later the joke's on us, as we look around to find that these people are suddenly running the country.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/10/12/glenn_beck/index.html

oreilly declares that for latin dancing, the obamas are PATRIOTS, because anyone who dances in public is a patriot
however, the jesus lizard of recent youtubes fame is a PINHEAD, for being named that i guess (also excuse to play the footage)

http://i36.tinypic.com/1564h3k.jpg

objection, your honor. the jesus lizard are *at least* the most patriotic thing in all of texas. probably gonna skip the reunion tour though.

and then there's this!
http://i35.tinypic.com/2cmra5e.jpg

haha that look!!

http://i34.tinypic.com/r7k4k0.jpg

is that picture an If They Mated of himself & bachmann?

it's lindsey graham!

which is to say, yes.

this story is all over the cable news

http://i34.tinypic.com/2j0xveo.jpg

"a balloon that looks like a flying saucer is tooling around california with a six-year-old boy in it. i have seen it all."

haha the whole office here is freaking out about it

http://i33.tinypic.com/wgpiq.jpg BALLOON CHASE

http://i34.tinypic.com/2dj8ifp.jpg

http://i38.tinypic.com/33y5dnp.jpg

ayo i'm on msnbc talkin bout falcon

waht

"We're going now to BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, who is in Austin, Texas. Hoos?"

wish i had a screencap of MAJOR JUSTIN SMITH of the sherrif's office

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/15/dylan-ratigan-michael-moo_n_322085.html

ratigan and michael moore -> on the same page lately. there is this point of convergence between his show & apocalyptic finance blog world & people like moore on the left & to some degree, populists on the right, even the freepers appreciated some of ratigan's ranting abt the banking system. i wonder if he winds up on fox or fox business. i mean the bailouts & wall street/main street disconnect is a big part of the anger driving all these tea party people. but following glenn beck fear and paranoia is like.. here's a good way to take actual good reasons for outrage & combine them with nutty conspiracy talk so that none of it is taken seriously. blablabla, shoulda stayed in grad school and switched to media studies & discourse analysis

also i was totally right about seeing roaches running over the camera on the msnbc
http://rawstory.com/2009/10/giant-bug-intrudes-on-howard-dean-msnbc-interview/

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/confirmed-marc-lamont-hill-fired-from-fox-news/

fox fires liberal commentator. i wonder why. because i thought the whole point of him being on fox in the first place was to be able to have "balance" from a liberal.. who wasn't very good at making liberal arguments in a way that would convince anyone in their audience that he was right.

> Update at 5:40pmET: Hill tweets: “In the words of Hov, “On to the next one”….

haha <3

http://odeo.com/episodes/25106705-Fox-News-Pundit-Talks-About-Van-Jones-Progressives-Why-the-Left-Keeps-getting-Smashed-On

^^ foxnews stan blogger points to this as the reason hill was let go, for saying beck and hannity were playing into racial fears basically. which.. is true. this is a pretty good show! he is much more interesting on the radio.

also, scarborough is alright sometimes. @ twitteronia:

I like Tebow as a person but the canonization is sickening. And the Ole Miss press conference? Spare me.

Tebow is a great kid. You know what I say. Spend 5 minutes with this kid and it will change your life forever. Oh wait.

Is Tebow having a seizure? Oh. Nevermind. He was just spazzing out about a 1 yard run.

BTW, two fumbles by the Chosen One in two quarters.

I will see your 100 snaps and lower it to 50. He won't start a single NFL game.

hahaha <3<3

maoists in the white house!

(dunno what to think about this one tbh...)

omg. interview with this person about something, voice is processed to disguise it and sounds like a creepy midget from a david lynch movie is talking. i don't even care what the point is here.

http://i37.tinypic.com/t7bgwn.jpg

"Concerned Parent" Reacts to Anita Dunn Remarks on Chairman Mao

this is hysterical

hahahahaha is he serious

"i've been thinking a lot about this and i don't want my child purged in the killing fields, i'm sure a lot of other parents feel the same"

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=concerned%20parent

isn't it crazy that the white house would try and CONTROL THE MESSAGE?

ahahaha the chairman mao mascot

:-( ashton :-(

this whole thing is so silly. she was looking for a catchy quote for a speech. the worst thing you could say is, she was being flip about chairman mao. but if that's the issue, so is beck.

fox is running these ads now like L@@K! WE DO ACTUAL NEWS AND REPORTING! i'm sure it's more pushback vs white house saying they aren't a news organization. it's a shame, since they do have a lot of good reporters and then the egomaniacs who do opinion take up nearly all the oxygen, so anyone who doesn't watch a lot of fox news would easily come to believe there's nothing else on that channel but beck/hannity/oreilly.

http://i38.tinypic.com/33cc0wj.jpg

self-pwn @ beck program:

1. wrong thinking
2. danger
3. ????
4. PROFIT

yeah, ppl really like major garrett. kinda wonder if he's embarrassed to tell normal ppl that he's the WH correspondent for fox news.

it's ok, there aren't any normal people in this city

haha. my parents want me to move there.

there are a lot of young people here! it's alright. i certainly don't know, but my guess is that in media circles, reporters are just doing their job (and trying to still have a job), some of them are cool, some of them are assholes. and the rest of the conversation as far as perceptions about one news outlet or another.. that's a political game and there's nothing they can do about it.

fox is sounding rather defensive about this though. terry mac went on fox news sunday and argued about it, but didn't have much besides really basic talking points. what i thought was pretty stunning was the promotion of the tax day tea parties, which.. i don't know how you defend the editorial decision to devote as many resources and promotion to that, as they did, and that included cavuto and people from fox biz channel who are NEWS people, not just beck and hannity. such a lost opportunity to have said to chris wallace, why the disproportionate coverage of that event?

do you think they're freaked? i don't understand that world at all (not as in they are disgusting savages, as in i really don't get motivations etc). if the tea parties/town halls were conservatives' big hope to kill health care reform, and if pimping the tea parties was fox's big hope to own the GOP, well neither looks like a successful bet right now -- health care reform is chugging along!

haha i think obama just awarded the GOP to fox the same way they awarded it to rush earlier this year

yessir
why would fox want to own the GOP? that's like owning the raiders!

isn't it crazy that the white house would try and CONTROL THE MESSAGE?

― burrhurt (J0rdan S.), Monday, October 19, 2009 9:34 PM (1 hour ago)

lol my roommate was just telling me about this completely incredulously

"the white house is like...telling the media...'this is what we want you to say we are saying'...and like the white house shouldn't have that kind of control over the message the media puts out

like

they convinced every network, every show on every network, to work in some plotline about national service week. so like, you like the wire, like you're watching the wire and your favorite character is like 'let's quit drinking and go to an AA meeting!'"

bubbles wasn't my favorite character, he's alright though

srsly though, there was something on beck about that, i didn't really pay attention to what he said, just assumed it was some trumped-up bs of little importance..